Thursday, October 12, 2006

The red maple in snow


The red maple in snow
Originally uploaded by jhhymas.
People have been talking about the projected snow all week. The promise came true overnight. Tonight it is still snowing. Precipitation is predicted for the next nine days, but mostly in the form of rain. All day today, the winter wonderland changed every few minutes. Overcast, patches of blue and lavendar sky, returning overcast. Wet snow which clung to the trees and then fell off in clumps, or melted, or blew away. Overcast again. Melted snow dripping from the eaves and from the trees. Sometimes there was wind, sometimes stillness. Sometimes it snowed a little, sometimes quite a bit, but the tree were never as heavily laden as they were in the early morning. Autumn leaf-fall is only about half completed, so there is stiil a lot of color set off by snow.
The wet snow reminded me of the last time I shoveled snow with my father. He had just turned 80. "Wet snow is heavy, sticks to the blade," he told me. He liked shoveling the dry powdery snow of that mid-January in Shaker Heights, Ohio. He wore an orange zippered hooded sweatshirt, which I still have. I took his photograph, but don't yet have it in digital form. He died suddenly that April.

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