A Sudden Change of Scene

A strident blue afternoon sky surrenders to a more familiar wintertime leaden cast. The snow falls rapidly now on this third Thursday in January.

Sometimes, I need these sudden changes of scene.

A December snow falls on sleigh bells and reindeer. A month later, the snow is all you have. January snows are brutal snows, winter at its most elemental.

My inner, earthy Capricorn, where my craggy cliff-dwelling self resides, cloven hoofed and woolly, relishes these gelid conditions. I need to be out in it. I need snow in my boots and ice on my beard.

You tune out the Doppler radar. You don't worry about how this will effect your morning commute. You surrender to the elements. You bask in a landscape transformed.

A few flakes. A gathering storm. Silent accrual.

It coats first the jagged bark on the windward side of ancient trees. It settles in deep engravings in old gravestones. Suddenly you notice green moss on "white marble," dingy in contrast to what has just fallen. Sandstone is not gray but a hundred shades of honey-toned buff, flecked with quartz.

Twin tawny-trunked cedars flank a stone marked "brothers."

The Virgin's sooty and web covered face, but decked still in brilliant raiments, celestial blue and pale pink.

A mantle settles with quiet determination over Poet's Hill, blanketing the obelisks and monuments to Newberries and Sills.


The red brick chapel gable slices through a sky of gray and a landscape newly white.

Gilded letters on the cemetery entrance arch achieve new prominence.

Leaving these wrought iron acres, color is now where you find it.

A Don't Tread On Me flag flaps more noticeably at an old house with a fierce dog, while two doors down teddy bear flags and red hearts cheerily anticipate Valentine's Day.

You gaze through barbed wire and chain link toward yellow goalposts and team colors.

Blotting out some things, making others more prominent. A change of scene. A change of weather. A liminal season.

Another day's light now gone, a few lingering Christmas lights seem poignant somehow. At first they seem tattered and lazy, intrusions on the newly crisp scene. But I come to appreciate the occasional tarrying display. Civic-mandated festivity ended weeks ago. A few individuals do what they must, in darkening frigid days.

Sure footed on the now-substantial accumulation underfoot, I crunch my way down toward the river, the place I always go, when I need to get to the place where the landscape seems primeval. The sort of place a woolly Capricorn feels most at home.

The hum and whir of the expressway give way, as cliffs newly decked in icy daggers muffle all but the roar of turgid water. It dances over sandstone: fleeting but eternal. It is not the relaxing, pounding beat of the surf, but somehow tense and restless. I watch it flow for a few moments, as it begins its turn at the terminal moraine that will bend its course back north toward the headwaters from which it emanates: a nervous, perpetual loop.

I watch the river disappear around a sandstone canyon wall, beyond which are submerged caverns and ferny grottoes and fantastical geological formations, now submerged behind the old trolley company's concrete dam.

I wonder what is beyond that bend, as I turn back downriver, and contemplate this rare quiet, but not still moment. So much ground covered, in a year that has just begun.