Tag Archives: ice

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Small miracle

Notice the coat. What is missing? Here is a cropped earlier photograph:

We go for a lovely walk in Rockcreek Park in Maryland. It is very cold and the creek is half frozen. My son goes down to the creek and throws rocks on the ice.

The ice makes wonderful sounds and the rocks mostly do not go through the ice. It is in beautiful patterns.

We get cold and are ready to head back. My son realizes that he has lost the button. We spend some time looking for a brown button in brown leaves. No button. We are colder.

When I look at the photographs later, they confirm that the button was lost on that walk!

The next day my ex-husband’s father’s second spouse comes to brunch. She is the last of the six grandparents. We have a lovely brunch. She is a potter and a landscape architect and is helping my son and daughter in law with their garden and yard. After brunch we walk back to the creek, keeping our eyes peeled for the button. She has a button collection but not that button. He might find one on the internet. Or he could contact Pendleton, since it is a Pendleton coat. Very handsome.

At the creek we search in the leaves and along the water, all of us. No button. I cross the little bridge, seeing a lump on the ice the right size and color. I clamber down the bank. “No,” I say, “Oh! Yes! Found it!” The brown button is sitting on the ice. It must have shot across the ice when he bent down to pick up a rock! “Hooray!” we all say. A small miracle for the season. Happy winter holidays and prayers for those lost.

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freeze

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: thaw.

I walked through Kai Tai Nature Park during the snow last month. Usually there are lots of ducks, sometimes geese, red wing blackbirds and a blue heron or eagle. This is taken with a zoom. The ducks were hiding out and the seagulls standing rather forlornly on the ice, waiting for the thaw.

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door to blue

For Norm2.0’s Thursday doors.

This is the arched entry from my house. I was trying to capture the blues in the snow on Monday as the evening light dimmed. It’s time I photographed a lot more of my local doors, since Port Townsend has many building built from 1860-1880. Not my house, it’s from 1929. More doors to follow soon.

evening light looking through arch at a snow covered yard, all tones of blue.
archway in the evening, with a hanging birdbath and snow on a yard, all blue light
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snow day

I am having a snow day. It snowed yesterday! Schools are closed and the roads are ice and it was 25 degrees when I walked into clinic. Clinic is cold and power and phones and computers are all out.

Now I have power back but internet is iffy. I have cancelled today’s patient. Some are 45 minutes or an hour away on good roads! We only have an inch of snow but the people north of me are reporting 6-8 inches. I have called people about tomorrow as well. Clinic will proceed if we have power and heat, but the people an hour away are cancelling. The weather forecast is that it will freeze at night all week, which is unusual here.

I am less than a mile from clinic and have ski clothes, so I should be able to get in unless we have an ice storm. We have paper files for back up so I could find phone numbers even with the power out. All except one new patient and now I’ve tracked that one down. We also have a battery lantern because the bathroom is really really dark with the power out. No windows.

I took the photograph last night. My ornamental plums were budding. I don’t know how happy they will be with a week of freezing weather!

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ski trip

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: dirt.

What worries a skier about the opening photograph?

Yesterday the introverted thinker and I went water skiing. On Mount Baker. It rained the whole time. Cold! And the introverted thinker’s knee hurt. We bagged it once I had ice puddles in my ski boots and could squeeze a stream out of my ski gloves.

On the very first lift ride, I realized that my wrist pocket was unzipped. Cash was still in there but the car key wasn’t. We skied down and I checked each place I’d been. No key. We got back on the lift and watched. There were a lot of small black specks. We discussed how much fun it would be to wait for AAA on the top of the mountain.

We skied down, going very slowly right under the lift.

FOUND IT!

Whew. After that neither of us whined. We skied until we were soaked. Her knee was being uncooperative and she was skiing warily. I couldn’t wear goggles because then my glasses fogged too much. Neither of us could see much through the rain. We went up a higher lift and then it was heavy wet slushy snowing. Then we really couldn’t see. Both nearly crashed skiing by proprioception, when a dip was invisible. I stopped at a sign and then fell backwards, visual cues just weren’t working for balance. Unhurt.

And what does this have to do with dirt? I started skiing at age 9 on the east coast, in upstate New York. We would go from Johnson City and meet my uncle and cousins at the small Labrador Mountain ski area. It was a family area. The snow was often awful. We skiied on ice, slush and dirt. Patches of dirt would show through and we learned to avoid them and avoid the rocks. The first time I skiied powder in Colorado I was mystified: I didn’t know how to ski it. But slush on top of hardpacked moguls? No problem.

So skiing Baker put me back to my tweens. The conditions were so familiar. My body was so comfortable with really crappy snow. The ungroomed parts had so much water on top that skis practically stopped. If I had been dressed in foul weather gear I could have skied most of the day.

But soaking wet is another matter. We turned in the skis and ate a late lunch. Happily used the car key to get dry clothes. Changed and drove back to Bellingham. We had a fabulous dinner looking out over the bay with a wonderful sunset.

Bellingham Bay with yellow, orange, pink and blue sunset over islands.
dinner and a sunset

Blessings all.