We received our first big snow of the winter yesterday—just as Marge and I were arriving back from South Carolina.  It was beautiful to observe from inside the warm car, but it did add a couple hours to our travel: one stretch, normally a 15-minute drive, took us an hour.  It was one of the wet snows that sticks to every twig and transforms the landscape.  I think I would have enjoyed it even more it I had been able to observe it like my favorite American poet, Robert Frost:

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

We moved back from California 15 years ago—in part to experience the seasons in the more dramatic fashion we were accustomed to when growing up.  Our winter wonderland is always greeted with delight [and just as exuberantly bade farewell in the spring!].

When I opened the kitchen curtains this morning to take in the view, I was startled by a huge flock of fleeing starlings, which had been startled in turn by the sudden appearance of this mug of mine hardly six feet from the perimeter of their feeding frenzy.  They had descended on a nearby crab-apple tree with its fruit nicely softened by a long series of freezings and thawings.  Hardly the size of cranberries, these mini apples have been savored for a number of weeks by robins, cedar-waxwings, and now the starlings, which, like the robins, have had to switch rapidly from insectivore to herbivore.

I’m not sure if this group of starlings—maybe a couple hundred strong—joins the major Grand Rapids evening gathering every night during the winter.  That large flock of probably more than a thousand puts on a aerial show that often astounds and dangerously distracts rush-hour drivers before they bed down for the evening on the girders of the city’s major downtown interchange [the birds, not the drivers!].  The flock aerobatics of these amazing fliers has driven poets to their journals for hundreds of years:

The Starlings

I strolled along the promenade
that keeps the waves from washing in
and by the pier I saw a cloud
of starlings flocking on the wing;
above the waves, what e’er the weather,
a storm of iridescent feather.

Reigning o’er a watery stage,
who choreographed this awesome dance
which breeds compulsion to engage
as if in theatre audience?
There’s thousands now in fulsome flight
To Aberystwyth’s great delight.

Written by Daniel Evans
(with apologies to William Wordsworth).

For a neat video of this phenomenon, go to this URL:

watch?v=XH-groCeKbE&feature=related

See you outdoors!

Dean