Fragments From Floyd

That we still have water to walk on in winter is a small miracle, dry as it has been since last spring. But a few heavy, melting snows slowly giving back to the deep fractures in rock that will hold next year’s flow would be grudgingly welcomed–especially if they’d come when travel was optional.

No wind. No birds or insects call. Has molecular motion ceased? I question if my own heart beats it is so still on this winter morning.

That afternoon, I drove 460 into Salem.

My god, what noisome ugliness hath man wrought?

And I lament that I don’t get out much. Why should I care to leave this quiet?

There’s nothing so remarkable here to someone who doesn’t know this exact spot through the seasons.

It appears to be still water reflecting the grasses on the bank of Goose Creek. But those waters are never still, and only when the little creek freezes in just a certain way–and only for a short while–does clear, smooth ice mirror without a thousand ripples scattering the light.

Sometimes you take a picture for yourself, knowing no one else will see in it what your eyes and memory bring home.

Finally, a winter cold spell sufficient to make it feel–and look–seasonal. So while I’m sort of short on blogging words, I’ll simply put up a half-dozen images over the remainder of the week for your warm-inside view of bundle-up and step-carefully weather along Goose Creek. Click to enlarge.

The low this morning was 0.3 degrees here. It is extraordinarily cold, but this is not altogether a bad thing. We found a tick on the dog earlier this week. We need the cold to wipe out those vermin finding their way further north each year as the seasons advance toward the warm side.

It is so cold that the wall heater in the bathroom off the Ann-ex is coming on automatically at its lowest-possible setting. The only way to shut it off is to fire up the propane wall heater in the larger room. That’s screwy.

And I am experimenting (since the more cold-natured one is away today) with draping things (the thin cotton window curtains on a variable tension rod and a wool lap throw hung on two hangers) across the exits to the room where I type and the wood stove does its best to throw off sufficient heat to keep me in the mid-sixties.

Theoretically, these drapes will keep more warmth captured where people (me) live and less lost to heating the empty parts of the house. Come time for SHMBO to come home, I’ll take down my experimental heat-holders and let the dark parts heat up for a while.

The pattern so far is for yet another icy winter, with the snow line creeping a little further north each year as the climate changes. So there will be no White Christmas on Goose Creek this year. Ah well.

Even so, I’ve been trying to get in a snow state of mind, what with it now being officially winter.

This shot came from a surprise March snow almost three years ago after the frozen creek had melted and the trees hung like embroidered lacery along Goose Creek.

If you look carefully, you’ll find this image (very tiny version) on page 28 of the Blue Ridge Country Magazine 2008 Travel Guide. Larger image at Flickr.

When winter comes, our morning walks don’t end, but they are no longer a casual tiptoe through the woods. Winter walks are a deep-sea dive into cold and dark, in a submersible of wool and down. Peeking out from stocking hats like diving helmets, we trudge heavily against the stern and biting currents of polar air that wash over us like waves. Without our swaddling spacesuits, our frail pink flesh would turn blue and brittle as December leaves, and our expedition would never be heard from again.

A summer breath, outdoors or in, is little different. But with the first breathing in of winter air outdoors, you know that you have stepped out into a world that is remarkable for things missing. Winter outdoors is a play on a stage vaguely familiar, from which most of the props have been temporarily removed. Heat is only one of the absent characters. Diminished too are color, smell and the sounds and motion of living nature. Even molecules move with lethargy.

Come the play of winter, all the best lines have been spoken by autumn; and, except for the wind, there are no words.

Summer is soft, yielding and supple. Winter is hard, unyielding and brittle. You feel winter through your feet and hear it in your steps. Cold dry air has its own smell, and there is a sound that belongs to the cold of winter. It is the sound of breathing, ears muffled, holding the beat of your own heart in wool like an echo in an empty shell. No birds call; insects sleep frozen solid under bark and sod.

Winter smells of wool and of wrapped humanity inside. From beyond the thick shroud of winter clothes there is only the near-fragrance of frost. No motes of aroma escape on warm currents from spicebush, sassafras, white pine, from dank soft creek mud or pasture clover. There should be an olfactory adjective, like monochrome, to describe the lunar-stark aromasphere of winter.

from Fred’ Slow Road Home in the hope that we will have winter this year

I could hardly believe my ears less than a week ago. I had to shake my head to be sure I wasn’t hallucinating or having a psychotic break with time and place: spring peepers were doing their best warm-March-day chorus down along the creek in late October! Later that day, I almost stepped on one bouncing up along the forest path, a tiny leaping X-caped lump the color of the fallen leaves.

The monarchs are taking their sweet time getting the heck outta here to move toward warmer roosts far, far west across the country.

The starlings are restless, but I’ve yet to see them do anything more than swirl and settle undecided about whether it’s time to go yet or not.

But there’s a fire in the stove this morning and the first hard frost glazes the pasture just now as the sun rises over the ridge. I’m about to carry the camera out and investigate, to confirm that we are finally having seasonal weather at last.

How would you describe what a breath of late October air feels and smells like where you live?

A single sentence: that is your task. Write a single sentence that says something about how you experience the smells of autumn.

More is fine, but start with a single sentence. You can do it.

Stop and consider your olfactory memories of fall and the feelings they convey for you. (Ask for contributions from your kids, and please pass the challenge along to others by sharing the link to this post!)

Consider sharing–in comments, including links to your blog post if you put it up for us. Might be fun, should enough folks accept this challenge, to merge all of the sentences together into one collaborative SENSE of Fall. Here’s mine:

Fall smells of wood smoke and fading grasses, of dead leaves that drape the yard in rust and gold, of tomatoes rotting on coiled black vines killed by first frost.

Fall smells of burning oak in the dark morning, the musk of coffee, heat and cold savored for a quiet moment on the front porch in chill air.

The sun slides up through baring branches, each turn rising farther south over the east ridge.

A shaft of light, and warm aromas lift like seasoned spirits; we breathe them in and know our days are numbered.

A day of drizzle and our woods steep to tea–a hundred wet leaves still bright decay along the path beside the meadow, mingle their fragrant deaths in a medley of summer passing.

Fall smells a little like winter.

We spoke to several relatives from the Deep South last week when the pollen count in Atlanta reached 5500 particles. And small wonder that we could barely understand their scratchy voices: allergies and throat irritations are at almost record levels.

And all that yellow stuff that coats their cars and makes that yukky scummy froth on every garden pond and lake is finding its way deep into their lungs. Thank goodness for MUCOCILIARY CLEARANCE! Right?

This is one of the healthy body’s unappreciated “miracles” that keeps our lungs from becoming the waste heaps they would quickly become if all the soot, fungal spores, bacteria, dust, rug and clothing fibers AND POLLEN that we breathe in every day stayed deep inside our lungs air exchange surfaces.

Two things happen: the GOBLET CELLS that are richly scattered in this epithelium or lining tissue secrete a sticky glue–MUCUS–that traps the particles.

The CILIA are living whips–cellular organelles that are constantly in motion. And this motion is not random but coordinated–even within entire fields of such cells–so that there is a POWER STROKE and a RECOVERY STROKE. The power stroke, of course, is in the direction of UP and OUT. The cilia (as you can see in these movies) push particles toward the throat where we reflexively swallow, sending those umpteen thousand pollen grains to the hydrochloric acid in our stomachs instead of ending up in our lungs. UNLESS…

Unless you kill the cilia. If you want to do that, light a cylinder of plant material with a match. Put it to your lips and inhale. Cilia in this environment beat weakly, then stop entirely. And where does all that mucus-plus-pollen end up? You guessed it. It slides so deeply in the lungs that it can’t be coughed up–no matter how violently you try. Make a wonderful medium for bacteria. Can you say PNEUMONIA?

(Parents, this little biology lesson with movies makes a good visual motivator to the would-be smokers in your family.)