February 3, 2014

A wet-in-wet watercolor sunrise, above very cold fields frosted white, but all is beautifully warm by 1:00 in the afternoon for long enough that a new, glossy green and bronze beetle appears on the wheel line hoses where it can soak up warmth it must find so welcome.

Not long later, though … storms and blackness, coming in from each quarter and I cannot get warm no matter the physical work, then snow curtains billow along the lower slopes of The Rincon though they don’t spill over the lip of the high canyon wall and onto us. The highest peaks are veiled from sight by the drifting and sidling white squalls, the mountains are gone, in the gray.

Sue reports that above her house poppies are blooming on the mesa skirting Hot Springs Canyon: earliest February, when Winter spars with Spring, and Spring will spar with Winter …