The View from a Drawbridge

Tag: winter

  • Leavenworth Revisited

    It’s amazing how the tenor of a trip changes with its participants.

  • Losing Sunlight

    The sun is shining somewhere…

  • Seasonal Transitions

    I am so grateful to be living in a climate of seasons again.

  • Nature’s Personality

    When I lived in Florida, I avoided nature at all costs. For me it was a place of spiders and snakes and mosquitoes and lightning strikes and fire ants and tornadoes and floods and, increasingly, forest fires. You couldn’t even jump into a pile of leaves for the scorpions. (How does one get through childhood…

  • The Sky is Falling

    I’ve been feeling a bit claustrophobic of late. Due to all the wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, I went about a week without seeing the sky. The sun and the moon both looked blood red from the pollution, and the smoke seemed to be pressing down upon us. I lost my mountain views at work,…

  • O’Dark Thirty

    I’ve been in Seattle for two years now, and I’d like to think I’m adapting well. But as Autumn establishes itself, I start to feel as if I’m in a foreign country. I suspect that will always be the case. Not since I lived in the Netherlands have I experienced such extreme changes in daylight…

  • Happy Winter!

    The term “solstice” always sets off a slight frisson in me. It evokes ancient rites and rituals, the customs of people we barely remember and are hard-pressed to comprehend. No matter what your spiritual beliefs or lack thereof, it’s hard to ignore the passage of time as indicated by the sun, our main purveyor of…

  • Beauty in the Gray

    It’s another rainy Seattle day. Just as it was yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that. You don’t realize how much you thrive on sunlight until it’s taken from you. I’ve only lived in the Pacific Northwest for a little over a year, but I’m already sensing a pattern. This time of…

  • Seasonal Angst

    After 40 years in Florida, I must admit that I’m not really accustomed to the changing seasons. Up here in the Pacific Northwest, the days get a lot shorter in the winter. I mean, a WHOLE lot shorter, as in 7 hours less daylight (as opposed to a 3 hour difference in the Sunshine State).…

  • Spring!!!

    Today is the first day of spring, and I couldn’t be more excited. You have to understand, I haven’t seen spring in 40 years. In Florida we had two seasons: Summer and January. So this is a huge deal for me. Even the thought of breaking out a different set of clothes has me grinning…