"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Tag: snowstorm

Snow Day!!!

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From “Dogwood Snow” by Dorothy Thompson in The Music of Silence, edited by Alyssa R. Stokes:

Growing up in the South,
It’s such a rare thing
To see the snows of winter;
That’s why I like the spring.

All the flowers begin to bloom;
Colors explode everywhere,
Painting a scene of beautiful hues
No artist will ever compare.

Most of all I like the woods
With trees in green, pink, and white.
Looking like God sprinkled the seed
With a gentle show of might.

And there you see the Dogwood tree
With a history we all know;
White petals falling to the ground
Making our Southern snow.

Hello!

Well! I don’t get to take photos like this very often, since a photogenic snowstorm is such a rare event here in Middle Georgia. But I knew before even looking out the window this morning that we’d had some accumulation: a layer of snow has a way of softening the sounds of the neighborhood that is unlike anything else. I remember from my childhood years in northern New York — where we used to get tons and tons of snow most winters — that a certain kind of quiet morning meant it had snowed overnight.

Our last notable snowstorm was in 2014 — over ten years ago! — and it was such a disaster, it’s still remembered in great detail by people in the area. The city and state gained well-deserved notoriety for being so unprepared for a two-inch, early afternoon snowfall that the interstates clogged with abandoned vehicles stuck on untreated roads. Stories are still told today of people who had to figure out how to walk home from some random spot on the highway, sometimes walking several miles on the same roads they would normally drive, around all the cars that couldn’t move. If you search Google images for Atlanta Snowmageddon 2014, you’ll see some representative (and very accurate!) images that are part of the collective memory of that storm. We have fared much better this time around, though the overnight hours will likely bring some freezing rain, best avoided by most drivers.

My Little Dog, at six years old, has never seen snow. While I had hoped for a few shots of his perky self bouncing around in the yard while the snow was still fluffy, here’s what actually happened: I opened the back door, he took one look at the yard, gave me one of those well-known dog side-eyes, and trotted to his safe space under my desk. Ah, well, maybe he just knew this: a few minutes later, it started raining, and snow isn’t much fun in the rain….

Thanks for taking a look!

Winter Scenes: After the Storm (Set 3 of 3)

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From the essay “House-Warming” in Walden and Other Writings by Henry David Thoreau:

“The snow had already covered the ground … and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast. My employment out of doors now was to collect the dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. An old forest fence which had seen its best days was a great haul for me….”

“At length the winter set in in good earnest … and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had not had permission to do so till then.”

The gallery below contains the last of three sets of photos I took in the days following a snowstorm in northern New York.

The previous sets in this series are here:

Winter Scenes: After the Storm (Set 2 of 3)

Winter Scenes: After the Storm (Set 1 of 3)

Enjoy the photos!

Bye for now……………….. 🙂

Winter Scenes: After the Storm (Set 2 of 3)

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From The Old Straight Track: Its Mounds, Beacons, Moats, Sites and Mark Stones by Alfred Watkins:

“The winter, with its light of low elevation, and with an absence of leaves, is by far the best season, and the lovely December day … gave an opportunity long hoped for.”

“[The] absence of leaves on trees, winter is by far the best time of year for a certain type of exploration….  Sun shining on one side and very low down is an ideal condition.”

The gallery below contains the second of three sets of photos I took in the days following a snowstorm in northern New York.

The first set in this series is here: Winter Scenes: After the Storm (Set 1 of 3).

The irresistible Ford truck partly buried in the snow made an earlier appearance on this site, in a different season, here: Before and After: Swamp Things.

Thanks for taking a look!

Winter Scenes: After the Storm (Set 1 of 3)

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From the short story “The Long Rain” in The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury:

“The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.”

Part of Bradbury’s themed collection The Illustrated Man, this short story was subsequently adapted and included in the 1969 film by the same name, then later featured in the television anthology The Ray Bradbury Theater. The power of the short story, and the film adaptations, came from Bradbury’s ability to take something typically benign — rain! — and turn it into a malevolent force that pounds a group of space travelers marooned on a distant planet. Spoiler alert: the men go insane.

I’ve thought of the film often over the past couple of weeks, when Atlanta’s version of the long rain continued with barely a pause from a few days before Christmas before finally stopping just yesterday. You know that soothing feeling you get from listening to the rain when you’re just barely awake in the early morning? It turns into something else, much less pleasant, on the fourth or fifth day in a row that rain beating on the roof wakes you up at 4:00 AM! 🙂

Source: Atlanta Weather Records Database on iWeatherNet.com.

I suppose it’s only marginally interesting to write about the weather in a blog post; but with above-average temperatures, the rain and clouds clearing away have revealed how nature’s reacting. Irises in my front garden are pushing out a few buds (stay tuned for macros!), normally dormant holly ferns have generated large new fronds, and even perennial lantana and hydrangea stems are dotted with the beginnings of new leaves. But of course it’s not spring yet and unless the temperatures remain above freezing for the next two months, most of this early growth could get crushed later in January or February.

The relentless rain, day after day, did give me a chance to pack up the holiday decorations and sweep out the Christmas glitter, jazz up the theme on my self-hosted blog, and work through the rest of the 200 archived winter photos that I started posting here. I often thought while working on the images that it would have been a hoot if, instead of two weeks or rain, we’d had two weeks of snow … so I guess I was treating myself to a vicarious experience of a snowstorm to blot out the sound of the pounding rain.

From the winter photos I processed, I’ve selected 51 to post here on my blog; below is the first of three sets that were taken in the days after a snowstorm some years ago when I traveled to northern New York around the holidays. Enjoy the photos; as always, thanks for reading and taking a look!