Each winter has a style. One year, all Tuesdays brought snow. This one may very well go down as the winter of mixed precipitation. A single day brings snow, rain, sleet, freezing rain, fog, ice pellets, mist, ice rain, and graupel — which is iced snowflakes, by the way. We have even had hail in a thunderstorm during a snow and ice storm. Hail usually being a summer kind of thing. 

Administration is a mess up there. Earl the weather god is no longer separating his buckets, he just throws down whatever is most conveniently at hand.

Which led us to a three-day event in which the ice rain sticking to everything turned to pellets sticking to nothing just as limbs started crashing left and right in the woods under the load of close to 1/4” of ice and the promised wind did not materialize. Saved by the bell. Since we had a disastrous ice storm here in 2008 when 3/4” of ice brought every line down as well as many poles and we lived off the grid for a week, we were all super-prepared and highly focused on this fresh hell.

Instead, we emerged into the New Year with a brilliant crystal palace forest, which in turn led to a storm of photos on all social media so that our collective carbon footprint was fixed back up to first world level instead of lagging a little as it is wont to.

It’s hard to photograph. You walk around from one ooh into another aah, and really all you can do its look at it in wonder.  Meanwhile, if you have any brain, you try to stay away from tall pines, which have a tendency to want to drop their tops on your head at such times.

[More below the photo gallery]

The photos may be ordered as cards and prints.
Browse the Galleries for more.

Blue Day (5 x 7 card, matted print up to 11 x 14)

Gift of Water 2 (5 x 7 card, matted print up to 11 x 14)

Good Fences (5 x 7 card, matted print up to 11 x 14)

Gift of Water 3 (5 x 7 card, matted print up to 11 x 14)

Gift of Water 4 (5 x 7 card, matted print up to 11 x 14)

Gift of Water 5 (5 x 7 card, matted print up to 11 x 14)

The Venerable in December (5 x 7 card, matted print up to 11 x 14)

Gift of Water 1 (5 x 7 card, matted print up to 11 x 14)

Gift of Water 6 (5 x 7 card, matted print up to 11 x 14)

Gift of Water 7 (5 x 7 card, matted print up to 11 x 14)

Gift of Water 8 (5 x 7 card, matted print up to 11 x 14)

But if you had gone into the forest anyway when the temps went back up above freezing and the sun came out, you would have been rewarded with diamond showers, not quite silently, but with a small dry tinkling sound of rain-but-not-rain. A quiet storm all of its own covering the snow on the forest floor with small pieces of ice.

And now it is gray and cool and damp and springlike. The forest is laden with water in all its forms, mist, ice, snow, small tinklers under the snow, and filled with the heady damp smell of a Christmas tree lot. Water, trees, and earth will do better any day than gold, frankincense, and myrrh for filling up your heart with love and commitment. The hound loves it all, busily smelling out the small holes where tiny creatures are hiding at the base of tree and stone wall.

Tonight it will rain. Tomorrow it will snow. Maybe it will be rounded off with graupel, too, as an early gift of the Magi.

We should be so lucky. Bring on your blessings of water, Earl, for Australia is burning.