Goodnight friends! The morning was blanketed in dense white, soft and thick and undulating over each little smothered tussock, stitched by the dainty spade-shaped tracks of foxes. My fingers sunk deep into the snow before reaching earth, nearly down to the third knuckle. Snow day whoops and squeals seem distant in the muffled hush. Each step onto untouched white is a distinct chopping bite of impact and a slow sinking grind, the sluicing, shuffling sounds of branches shedding their weight all around. Pavements are a menace, already compacted down into an untrustworthy translucent icy mass, sometimes sticky, sometimes slippery, edged with mounds of grimy slush and a slow constant trickle of chill water. Already back up to 2°c and with no fresh fall, at this rate this bumper fall may be mostly gone before Monday.
Mostly feeling recovered from exercise, but some lingering pain pulsing through my joints, scalding and icy in turns, from the cold. Pushed through on a slightly longer walk than I’ve been taking recently, trying to savour the dramatic transformation and rebuild a bit of the stamina I feel like I lost over the course of my December relapse.
May we acknowledge and accept our fears and desires with honesty and compassion today!
Image ID: Photo of the sun, golden and hazy-edged, wreathed in pale clouds above a snow-covered churchyard, the bare wiry trees and the spire and the dark oblongs of snow-capped gravestones all adrift on a rippling sheet of velvety white, raking light picking out every dip and hollow in soft blue shadow.
