Weather here defies pattern-seeking. High elevation and dynamic terrain make fickleness, with a propensity for the extreme, the norm. Sure, there are thunderstorms in summer, but their duration, ferocity, and direction of approach keep me guessing. The same can be said of wind, except it will kick up whenever the heck it wants to. Snow…
A couple of weeks back, after about a half-inch of snow had fallen overnight, Doug came back inside from feeding the horses their morning hay with a report: “Ummm, I’m pretty sure there are cat tracks on the driveway,” he said, “And it looks like it lay down, too.” I booted up and went outside…
The season is over. The potatoes are dug, as are the carrots and the dinky onions. The kale, while green right up until an arctic front settled over us and drove temperatures below zero, is done for the season. The leaves of the cherry tree abruptly turned and dropped last week, after having lingered for…
I don’t get out much. This is intentional and by nature. I enjoy the vast good fortune of a life that revolves around a home place in a beautiful natural setting. I work from home, and my husband and I continually strive to arrange our leisure time to include activities that do do not require…
A fringe of scarlet on the leaves of a Rocky Mountain maple. The fade to gold in the cottonwoods. A landscape gone tawny under sun-cured grasses. Short glossy hairs dropping off the horses, replaced by fuzz. Frost-blackened leaves curling on the beans, the squash, and the tomato plants. All of which raises the question: Where…
My tastes don’t generally run toward clear favorites or coveting the “best” of this or that. I favor variety and contrast and have a tendency to be suspicious of my strongest biases, regarding them with clinical curiosity and trying to figure out where they’ve come from and whether they’re worth hanging on to. Evidently, though,…
For the most part, the wildlife around our place regards me with either fear or wariness. Birds flutter, squirrels scurry, deer bound. The latter, admittedly, only retreat to their calculated safe distance before turning to assess my intentions, but all of them move away when they detect my presence. Except the ravens. They don’t fly…
Spring snows don’t last long. The sun has a better angle for its rays—and more hours in the day—to use against the accumulated white. The air temperatures are higher. And the ground is no longer frozen but is itself a heat source, a broad expanse of thermal mass slushing the snow steadily from below. Blizzard…
I know spring has arrived when the bluebirds stay put for snowstorms, toughing it out through the white and wet instead of moving down to lower elevations to avoid the cold. Three different storms dropped snow in the first three weeks of April, and I felt for winter-weary friends in the East as the weather…
For the first time in five or six years, I haven’t lost the garlic. I plant it in the fall, breaking a few heads up into individual cloves and digging them in like little bulbs. The garlic bed shifts from year to year, as do the locations of most of the garden crops. My riff…