Blog 1113 – 09.13.2018
“Winter Is Coming”
That is an ominous line from the HBO long running fantasy series Game Of Thrones. I remember that my mother when I was a boy hated and dreaded winter. I suppose most of the women that I have known felt the same way. I remember when I first arrived for a five month work assignment in Wyoming some years back that the lady pipeline inspector who was showing me the ropes said, “Dave, you are a lucky man – there is a woman behind every tree in Wyoming.” I smiled and looked around and as far as I could see there were no trees. The joke was on me. It was days before I saw the first tree in that part of Wyoming and it was a scrubby cedar tree high on a rise we would have called a mountain in Tennessee but in Wyoming it was just a rise.
In my travels I spent most of a summer in Alaska – jacket weather and I noticed the evergreen trees did not grow tall. I ask someone why and they said because the winters were long and the temperatures severely cold and that kept the trees from growing tall. I also noticed there was a real shortage of women there in Alaska too. Only Inuit (native) women and a few hardier new comers (like Sarah Palin, hardy, gun toting, tough women.
I suppose being a southern boy, born and breed, it surprises some that I love the winter and the cold. I tease that I must have been a Yankee boy in a previous life for I dearly love the snow. And little thrills my heart more than to awake to see out my door a winter wonderland all icicles and snow hushed and sparking in the sunlight.
A couple, almost three years ago now, my wife Linda Lee gave me a little snowman with a light sensor that dances and only a look at that dancing snowman makes my heart dance with delight at the thought of winter and of snow.
And before snow comes to the northern Minnesota countryside around Bemidji, Minnesota where I am currently working the trees will put on their party dresses and dance for us. Four years ago I wrote a poem to celebrate that dance. I share it here with you:
In The Autumn Trees…
In the autumn trees
Put on their party dresses
And dancing let them fall
To the wind’s wild caresses.
In the winter their naked limbs
Covered in white diamonds, furs
The lusty peeking of the sunlight
A vision of wonderland confers.
In the springtime buds and blossoms
As if waking from the dead
Pretty flowers in growing flowing locks
Bird nest crowns upon their heads.
In summer trees unfold
Their full umbrellas to the sun and rain
Soon again they don their party attire,
The blazing colorful ball begins again.
Winter is coming, but before it does, enjoy the fall festival as the trees put on their party dresses.
Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White
