Deep Freeze

It finally got up to 0 degrees at 2:00 today, after a low of -19 last night. The sun is out but everything feels suspended. 

The cold frame in the garden is crusted over with ice. In a few months it will be closed, with green seedlings sprouting under the glass.

The chickens got an extra treat of hot oatmeal with their apples this morning. It's messy but they love it. I checked for frostbitten combs and feet, but they all seem to be fine.

Inside we are listening to the furnace crank on over and over, while the wind blows smoky snow past the windows. Our house is so bright and white inside when the sun reflects off the snow that our eyes get tired after awhile. We are working away at Greek history. R surprised me by showing me this picture from her history textbook (The Human Odyssey), and asking if this is the same painting we saw at the Art Museum last week. She's right! It's "Le Cheval de Troie (The Trojan horse)" (1874) by Henri-Paul Le Motte. I love when she puts ideas together across subjects like that.

We looked at some other artists' conceptions of the Trojan horse, some that looked like a realistic horse and some, like this amazing painted still from the 2004 movie Troy,  that looked like they had been nailed together with ships' timbers. Or the "planks of fir" from Virgil's Aeneid. 

After many years have slipped by, the leaders of the Greeks,
opposed by the Fates, and damaged by the war,
build a horse of mountainous size, through Pallas’s divine art,
and weave planks of fir over its ribs:
they pretend it’s a votive offering: this rumour spreads.
They secretly hide a picked body of men, chosen by lot,
there, in the dark body, filling the belly and the huge
cavernous insides with armed warriors.

- (Virgil's Aeneid, Book II)

January Is Rounded With a Snow

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
- The Tempest Act 4, Scene 1, 148-58

January closed with a big blustery snowstorm.

R's tree swing. 

 

Silver maple in a sugar snow. 

I promise the chickens are o.k. Charlie. We let them tough it out so they'll be hardy enough for cold weather, but when it gets close to zero we put a heat lamp in their coop. Their waterer has a heated base also, so it never freezes. Charlie only trusts himself with their well-being.

Good dog. 

Marshmallow roasting with Daddy after a long, cold afternoon sledding with the neighbors. Charlie used to hate the fire as a puppy. He would bark at it and run upstairs to glower from a safe distance. Gradually he got used to it and now he can relax and warm his fur next to it. Except if someone makes a blowing sound, to stoke the fire or put out a flaming marshmallow--that drives him crazy for some reason. I love all the border collie hyper-aware eccentricities. And that they are so happy to come inside for cuddles on laps when their feral outdoor time is done.

Holiday Weekend Trail Walk

Overcast Sunday afternoon walk, through the messy muddy melting snow.

excerpt from "Year's End"

Now winter downs the dying of the year,   

And night is all a settlement of snow;

From the soft street the rooms of houses show   

A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,   

Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin   

And still allows some stirring down within. 

                                         - Richard Wilbur 

Trail Walk January 8

A Sunday walk down the snowy trail with our neighbor friends.




It's a perfect 30 minute walk to the school playground. 

S'mores

More snow today, a wet, heavy snow that hung off the branches.

Dinner was lemon chicken breaded in panko; sweet potatoes with oranges and cinnamon; spinach, and polenta cut into flowers and browned in a cast iron skillet.

We had a fire and made s'mores.

This is what it looked like under the streetlight at 7:30 p.m.

Snow Day Three

We are on Day Three of this strange sick day/snow day week. R has been sick, then they canceled school for weather. It's been three days since R or I stepped outside. This morning it was fourteen below when we woke up.

Charlie is loving the attention.







Ice crystals are still on the upstairs windows at 3 p.m. Yesterday it never got above zero. Right now the sun is out, but it's five degrees. No burst pipes, and so far the cars are starting up.

May Snow

We are back from a wonderful trip to New Mexico to celebrate my Dad's 80th birthday with my mom and my brothers & families. What a memory--a lot of pictures to go through.

In the meantime, we came back to an overnight snow. The crabapples are just budding and the cherry blossoms are out, but it looks like the snow didn't hurt them. We're supposed to get a few more inches of snow tonight.

Our new little Montmorency cherry tree that we planted last spring. This is its first year for blossoms.



I like the crabapples best when they are at this stage, the intense pink just before they open.

Happy Birthday Dad! Thanks for all the time you spent with us. More pictures to come.

Lacy Snow

Yesterday it started snowing late in the afternoon. There were only a few inches, but it was a beautiful, lacy snow that stuck to the bare branches.

Charlie with his beloved Snakey.

R helped her dad bring in firewood. Look at her heavy load!

Our next door neighbors gave us a huge pile of firewood last summer, because they don't like all the bother of using the fireplace any more. We are so grateful to have it.

She loves to turn off all the lights and sit in front of the fire. I often wonder what she'll remember of these days, when she's grown.

And this was dinner. (I took the picture this morning of the leftovers, in better light. It made a great breakfast too.)

Lent is a good time for meatless dinners, even if it's not Friday. I thought these were really good, and Dan and R liked them too.

Italian Tofu Cutlets

This recipe is adapted from I Can't Believe It's Vegan. I changed it quite a bit, and of course adding egg makes it not vegan. They're like a veggie burger, but lighter, less heavy-grain and bean-y, and more flavorful.

INGREDIENTS:
1 1/2 medium red or yellow onions, sliced thinly
2 bell peppers cut into strips (green, colored, or a mixture)
4 cloves garlic
2 T olive oil
2 T Italian Seasoning
2 14-oz. blocks firm tofu
1 t. fresh parsley
salt and pepper to taste
2 T nutritional yeast
1 T garlic powder
1 cup vegetable broth, water or white wine
1/2 cup sundried tomatoes, sliced in strips (optional)
2 T tamari or soy sauce
1 cup of unsalted raw or roasted sunflower seeds
2 cups bread crumbs
1 egg, lightly beaten
fresh lemon juice
olive oil

Preheat oven to 375, and oil a baking sheet.

1. Saute onions and garlic until golden. Add peppers and saute until softened. Stir in Italian seasoning.
2. Crumble tofu into a mixing bowl, and parsley, nutritional yeast, garlic powder, and salt and pepper to taste. Mix together and add half of the sauteed onion, garlic & peppers.
3. Deglaze the pan with the broth, wine or water, and add tamari. Turn off the heat, and let the sundried tomatoes soak in this liquid for a few minutes.
4. Add the sundried tomatoes and their liquid, the beaten egg, and 1 cup of unsalted raw or roasted sunflower seeds to the tofu mixture, and transfer it to a food processor.
5. Pulse until the mixture starts to come together. Add 1 cup of bread crumbs*, and pulse until the mixture comes together and is a bit sticky.
6. Season the remaining 1 cup of bread crumbs with salt, lemon pepper and red pepper flakes, if desired, and put them on a plate. Form the tofu mixture into cutlet-size rectangles, and flatten each one about 1/2 inch thick. Pat it in the bread crumbs to coat on both sides, and place on the oiled sheet. Squeeze fresh lemon juice lightly over each cutlet, drizzle with olive oil, and bake for 12 minutes.
7. Serve on a bed of salad greens, topped with sliced avocado and sunflower seeds and the remainder of the sauteed peppers and onions. Or serve in a sandwich roll, topped with the peppers and onions.

The original recipe calls for melting (vegan) mozzarella on top, but we like it without cheese.

*I keep the whole wheat bread crusts I cut off of sandwiches in a bag in the freezer, and make crumbs in the food processor as I need them.

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day

Today is the fifth day in a row that temperatures have fallen below zero.

We've had these on the upstairs windows, on the inside panes behind the storms, for almost a week.
Ice feathers

I woke up thinking about Auden's poem, "In memory of W.B. Yeats":
"He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day."

The weather makes life feel serious. Not as dour or deserted as Auden's dark cold day, but grave and austere. Daily things are critical. There's a feeling of free-fall as the mercury sinks. I get out of the car and walk R all the way to the door of school because if I didn't see her go inside and watch the door shut behind her, I would feel uneasy all day. The last two nights I've woken before dawn with a terrible dread that I forgot to bring Charlie back in after his last trip outside. I have to get up and check in his crate to see his little sleeping body before I can go back to sleep.

On the way to school today, the wind was blowing swirling drifts of snow, in big puffs across the frozen field where there is an iris farm in spring. I was trying to remember the Galway Kinnell poem about smoke and snow. I looked it up when I got home. It's from "Two Seasons":
"I spoke to you that last winter morning
Watching the wind smoke snow across the ice."

That's exactly what it looked like, someone slowly and dreamily exhaling puffs of smoke across the ice.

R likes to stand on the bed and look and look through the crystals. She says it's the Snow Fairy's palace.

When I was little I would sit on the counter in the bathroom and open the mirrored medicine cabinet until it made a tunnel with the wall mirror, a long infinitely repeating icy corridor. I would walk my finger down it and pretend I was in an ice castle.

Last week, R made a bird feeder from a crayon box and filled it with bread crumbs and seeds and hung it outside, so the birds could reach food if the ground was too snowy. I asked her if she thought that that the window crystals were a message from the Snow Fairy, to thank R for taking care of her wild animals. I didn't think she would take it seriously, but now she opens the storm window to write "thank you" in the ice on the outer window. She leaves little notes and gifts for the Snow Fairy before she goes to sleep.

I didn't see her put this on her windowsill last night, and she was upset this morning that the Snow Fairy hadn't taken her gift. "I got mixed up, I put Tooth Fairy, but it's not, it's the Snow Fairy. Is that why she didn't take it?" I asked her why she chose those things to give, and she said "They're just some toys that I still like, but I want her to have them." I talked her into keeping the toys and just leaving a note next time.