Signs of spring...

A sale at my favorite quilt shop, a visit to the mountain where I rode my horse years ago, photographing some favorite barns in May Valley and Hobart, then home to work on the new quilt. A talk with "our" favorite uncle in Colorado, and cabbage soup for dinner.

My early rhododendron is blooming, the daffodils are 8 inches high, and there are buds on the hellebores. These are welcome signs that spring is coming... I'm thankful that the weeds haven't yet started to grow!

Time to go chase winter...

A quiet day spent editing photographs, and working on a quilt. Then we met friends for a beer and dinner, and talked until late, catching up. No rain today, but it's warm. I'm beginning to think winter is over, and that's a shame. I need to pack up and follow the snow, before it's too late.

Stuck between autumn and winter...

Yesterday's unexpected weather brought even more snow to the Enumclaw Plateau, and this farm I photographed two days ago looks completely different today. The snow on the craggy foothills is building up, in beautiful contrast to the green pastures that frame this old farmstead.

This contrast of winter and autumn is still going strong in early January, but autumn won't be able to hold on for long... more snow is on its way.

Coldest day this year...

It was 23 degrees when I got up this morning, not even close to the cold winter weather at our friend's house in Ellensburg, where it was minus 1 degrees this morning. But for us, darned cold.

I rekindled the fire in the wood stove, and brewed a mug of tea, and settled down to read my e-mail and look at photographs on Instagram. I tossed toys to Madison and played with her, and laughed at her antics. She's nearly 7 months old now, and exactly 7 pounds. She's growing up fast.

It was a quiet, peaceful morning, and not much changed throughout the day. It stayed sunny and cold and absolutely beautiful, a good day to spend by the fire and think about plans for the new year.

Cold mornings...

Bright fall sunrises that wake me up.

Blue jeans and knee socks and a warm sweater.

Weeds and herbs and grass, dusted with frost.

The first "Dang, where did I put the ice scraper?" 

The unbelievable bliss of heated car seats.

Breakfast with a good friend at a favorite restaurant.

Wrapping my hands around a steaming cup of coffee.

Finding a gorgeous red sweater at my favorite thrift store.

Home to build a fire in the woodstove, and write my journal.

Finished reading "In the Kingdom of Ice" (appropriate, yes?)

Let the light shine through...

Some would crop the leaf cluster at the top of the frame. But for me, 

it hints at much more color in this beautiful maple tree, so I kept it.

This morning it was 33 degrees, with frost in the pasture that slopes down to the pond. There's plenty of firewood to keep the farmhouse warm, and a cat on the bed. But I got up anyway. Eight ducks have moved onto the pond, swollen to normal size after days and days of rain. I'm loving the earlier sunrise... more daylight for this morning person. The rising sunlight through our neighbor's maples makes them look like stained glass, green and gold and red against our dark green cedar trees.

Solitude...

A good report card from the eye doctor. An armload of new books from the library. The visiting cat now comes when called, and he's spending time sitting on the windowsill, listening to the birds. The wind is howling, and the evergreens are whipping in the wind... a storm with torrential rainfall is headed our way. DW will clean the chimney this afternoon, so we can have the first fire of the season tonight.

Leaves rich with fall color have been tumbling to the ground all day... winter is coming.

Red...

Up early to make a pot of tea, then went downstairs with my book to spend time with Murphy. Once the rest of the house was up and packing and making plans, we took my bright red MX-5 for an emissions test. It doesn't usually get to go out in the rain, but in spite of that, we still managed to make most of the drive with the top down.

Once we were out, we didn't want to go back home. Dave suggested lunch, and we considered The Mint, but decided to take the back roads to Maple Valley, and have a late lunch at Testy Chef instead.

When we got home, the kids were engrossed in a movie. I finished my book, then took my camera out to look for fall foliage. The dark rainy day did wonders for the bright red and gold leaves.

When I was good and chilled, I came in for warm clothes, then curled up with the laptop to search for free typefaces that look like handwriting. I'm looking for something that mimics my own writing, to use for my E|J logo on photos. I haven't found the perfect one yet, but have found a lot of fun typefaces to try out.

Foggy mornings...

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

Carl Sandburg

It was one of those fall mornings, when the sun rises unseen, shrouded in thick fog. Beautiful in its own way, mysterious and cool and damp.

I don't know how to photograph fog. It never turns out the way my eyes see it, or the way it looks in the lens. Maybe that's part of the mysterious side of fog, that it keeps its identity hidden from view, and only lives in our memories.

And autumn moves on...

A lot made me smile this morning:  Waking up in my own bed. Blue jeans and knee socks. A bright fall sunrise. Pulling on a warm sweater for this chilly morning. The heated seat in the Pilot, as I headed out to buy milk for oatmeal. Being home, driving familiar roads and looking for fall changes in the pastures and woods around my little farmhouse.

Last week's windstorm left the porch and patio littered with leaves from the cedar tree, but there's still much more to come down. The smoke tree has turned bright gold, and the garden phlox is still in bloom. The whole garden is messy... looks like fall has finally arrived.

Favorite time...

The fall came early this year. I am not unhappy with the shorter days, the crisp mornings, the urge to dig deep in my sweater drawers, looking for last year's favorites. The overwhelming desire to nest, to clean out closets, to put things to rights before winter.

My favorite farm stand is stuffed with apples and corn on the cob and onions and heirloom tomatoes. And on the other side of the building, table after table of chrysanthemums in all those gorgeous autumn colors, dark red and copper and gold and leaf green.

Yesterday I walked my neighborhood trail, where big-leaf maples have started dropping yellow leaves that crackled under my boots. After being dormant through late summer, the recent rains have brought the grass to life, as green as early spring.

The Canada geese have begun to fly over, looking for winter homes. There are always a few on the ponds in our valley each winter; we used to have a pair before our pond got too overgrown. I love hearing them in the morning, as they fly over the house on the way to the creek.

For all these reasons, it's my favorite season of the year.

Surrounded by trees...

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness

- John Muir

From the archives, November 2011 | The northern slope of Tiger Mountain above the tiny mill town of Preston, the morning after (and during) the first snowfall of the season. Cottonwood and alder and maple merge into the evergreens like a green and gold crazy quilt, and where the trees disappear into the clouds, it's snowing.

Winter frost...

Frost grows on the window glass, 

forming whorl patterns of lovely translucent geometry.

Breathe on the glass, and you give frost more ammunition.

Now it can build castles and cities 

and whole ice continents with your breath's vapor.

In a few blinks you can almost see the winter fairies moving in...

But first, you hear the crackle of their wings.  

Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

The road to fall color

Those trips that just fall into place, when everything works out just as you hoped, are magical. It's been a long time since we headed off in the autumn in search of fall colors, and hoping to find more back roads that we haven't explored. This trip also added in some fly fishing in eastern Idaho, in the shadow of the Grand Tetons. Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho. We timed it just right. Everything was perfect, especially the colors.

Flannel and down...

It's that time of year, that time of fast weather change that reminds us how close the cold days are.

We got more than a hint of it on our road trip. Temperatures dropped into the twenties in Colorado, where we also got snowed on. And in eastern Idaho, in the shadow of the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone, we shivered in the early morning hours until the sun rose above the canyon walls.

So... time to fill a couple of holes in my much depleted wardrobe (and also our winter bedding). One thing I could have used on our road trip is a packable fiberfill jacket to wear under my rain jacket. I know... should have bought one before our trip! Thankfully, Costco still had a few left, and I found one in my favorite red, just like the first jacket I ever bought at REI when Davey and I started backpacking. It folds up into an inside pocket, which is very cool. I feel warm just looking at it.

I also found some striped Merino wool socks, perfect for wearing with my paddock boots at the barn, and inside my woodcutting boots. On cold mornings before we light a fire in the woodstove, they'll keep my tootsies warm on the cold hardwood floors.

It's also time to dress the bed for winter, but our old flannel sheets are worn out. It's tough to find California King bedding, but I was lucky enough to find some yummy plaid flannel sheets that didn't cost the earth. It's cold... they're going on the bed today.

Fresh...

I gathered a basket of Red Delicious apples and Anjou pears from the orchard today. A riot of green and red color, stripes, and brown speckles. Does anything say autumn better than this?

A year ago...

We spent the weekend with friends near Lake Wenatchee, and we both tried snowshoeing for the first time, with borrowed gear (and boots). It was easier than I thought, and would be a fun way to keep walking through the winter (provided, of course, we actually get snow on this side of the mountains). It would be a fun thing to do anytime we're on the eastern slope with friends lucky enough to live there, and if we ever moved to Idaho or eastern Washington, I can see snowshoeing in my future.

The Stevens Pass pathway

We headed home from Leavenworth this afternoon. It snowed all weekend long at the condo, so we expected a lot of new snow on Stevens Pass. When we came over the pass on Friday, it was sunny and gorgeous (and the cleared snow on either side of the highway was about 10 feet high). Today was a different story. The road was packed snow and ice, the snowplows were working in threesomes, and the highway looked like a narrow pathway. We left at 2:30, and it took three hours just to get to Monroe.

Snow tires were required, and lots of people stopped to install chains. When we passed an entire row of abandoned cars and trucks on the shoulder, buried in snow so they looked like giant mushrooms, we wondered how much snow (and how fast) had come down overnight. Most was probably caused by snowplows... I would not like to leave my car in a snow zone.

It was too dangerous to stop for photographs, so I had to be content with snapping a few shots through the windshield.

The worst part of the drive was the east-side climb up to the summit, and a dozen miles of compact ice in the transition zone from heavy snow to rain. For miles, between Skykomish and Sultan, all the roadside signs had icicles hanging from them, and the bushes and trees were coated with ice.

Touring on skis

We had the best time this weekend. It's been snowing for a couple of weeks now, something in the range of a foot a day, and the skiers are in heaven. We don't downhill ski anymore, but our friends have a condo near Leavenworth, and invited us over for a weekend of food and wine and cross-country skiing. Their condo is right on a golf course near Lake Wenatchee, and there are 35 km of groomed cross-country trails available, starting right outside their back door.

Almost as soon as the grooming SnoCat came through around 7:00 am, skiers started to hit the trails.

This was the first time we've been on skinny skis since about 1980, when we decided to set our downhill gear aside and find out what cross-country skiing was all about. We signed up for a ski club outing, picked up our gear at a Wenatchee ski shop, had an hour-long lesson, then headed up a logging road off the old Blewett Pass highway (at least, it's the "old" Blewett Pass now... back then, it was the "real" Blewett Pass).

We came home after that experience and went back to downhill skiing. There were lots of reasons; mostly to do with fish-scale skis that didn't glide, and the wrong wax for the changing snow conditions. Climbing was OK, but when we headed downhill after lunch, we were quickly frustrated: picture a moderately steep logging road, with plenty of snow, and not being able to slide down it. We had to pole and push all the way back to the car.

But this weekend was completely different. First of all, it was cold all weekend, and it snowed pretty much non-stop. We went out the first day for a short time, and the snow was crusty but freshly groomed. It took a bit to find my balance, and not be fearful of sharp turns and downhill stretches. But I took it slow and searched for rhythm, and had a good time. The second day was even better. It was still snowing, but the wind had died down, and it was warmer. Jim waxed our skis (tips and tails), and that made gliding easier.

A foot of snow dumped on the pass overnight so we didn't spend much time on skis today. But we came home thinking maybe we'll buy our own gear (at least, our own boots).

Forcing forsythia

This is something I look forward to every year: bringing in armloads of forsythia branches, arranging them in vases, and putting them throughout the house. This is one of the most satisfying gardening chores for me. Better than pulling weeds, better than spreading bark. Maybe even better than buying new plants for the garden.

The vase of branches has only been inside for a couple of hours, but the buds are already turning green. Soon the bright yellow blooms will open up, brightening up dark corners and making it seem like spring is just around the corner.