So far winter hasn’t been all that harsh. No blizzards, no subzero stretches. We’ve gotten snow a few inches at a time, which has thinned out during days just above freezing. Still, I suspect an Arctic blast is coming soon. Probably after the heavy snow due tomorrow night.
In the meantime, temps around freezing mean we can take walks in forest preserves. Not long ago we took the dog out to the Poplar Creek Forest Preserve (formally the Arthur L. Janura Forest Preserve). It’s close by here in the northwest suburbs, but we hadn’t been in a good while.
Off the main path is a path to Bode Lake. Looks frozen over, but I bet the ice is pretty thin, so no walking on the lake unless you’re a small creature. No ice fishing either. If that’s the price of a mild winter, I don’t mind.
I don’t know Rep. Mike Gallagher (R.-Wis.), but I believe he had the spot-on quote for the day, which I heard on the radio this afternoon: “This is banana republic crap.”
Five months ago, the full flush of summer marked Spring Valley. Two days into the new year, the place was markedly brown and gray and white.We had a pretty good walk anyway, especially since the paths were mostly clear of ice patches. Snow and ice fell during the last days of December, and on New Year’s Day itself, but it was above freezing the next day, enough to melt some of the ice. Not much ice on the creek either, but I wouldn’t want to fall in. The unpaved trails offered the crunch of snow underfoot, a sound I like. The peony field.
The snow was wet enough to cling to most of the trees.It sifts from Leaden Sieves — It powders all the Wood. It fills with Alabaster Wool The Wrinkles of the Road —
“A major winter storm swept through the Mid-Atlantic on its way to the Northeast, bringing heavy snow, freezing rain and dangerous driving conditions,” I noted in the NYT this evening.
Not a particle of snow hereabouts, but I’m sure our turn will come eventually. That made me wonder: are snow days now things of the past? Even when kids are back in school in person again, say next winter, a heavy blizzard would mean they have to stay home, but they can still go to school remotely, as they do now. I suspect most kids don’t realize this yet. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when they do.
Not that it matters in this household any more. Next year in college, if Ann feels like a snow day, she’ll cut classes. But she and her sister might be in the last generation, in this country at least, to remember getting out of school for inclement weather.
The concept was mostly hypothetical to me as a student. During my entire K-12 run in Texas I only got two that I remember. As a parent, I’ve experienced a good many more than that.
Winter starts on December 1, as far as I’m concerned. Some past years, that day has obliged us with snow cover, or least snow flurries, such as in 2006 and 2008 and 2010.
Not this year. I had to be out early in the morning to be somewhere, but it was merely dry and below freezing.
Or maybe winter started the night about a week before Thanksgiving when I was out ’round midnight and spotted Orion riding high in the sky, trailed by the loyal Canis Major.
After I got home yesterday, I had a lot to do, and so didn’t spent much more time out in the early winter temps, or even thinking about them. Early in the evening, I looked up the local temperature. About as cold as I thought: 28.
Then I had a moment of idle curiosity. The Internet was made for just such moments, so I looked up what I wanted to know: how cold it was at that moment in Anchorage, Alaska: 37.
Not as cold as I thought. The kind of thing TV weather presenters occasionally yak about, though usually in January: Look, it’s colder in Illinois than Alaska! But according to the respective 10-day forecasts, it will soon be single-digits in Anchorage, but not here.
More rain today. The ground is soggy, the grass is high and mosquitoes are breeding. Full spring, you might call it, except it wasn’t quite warm today. The heater kicked in this morning, an accompaniment to the hard-working sump pump.
Here’s a measure, just a single metric, of the state the country’s in: AAA, which usually forecasts domestic travel volume for the major summer holidays, isn’t doing so for the Memorial Day weekend.
“For the first time in 20 years, AAA will not issue a Memorial Day travel forecast, as the accuracy of the economic data used to create the forecast has been undermined by COVID-19,” its release says. “The annual forecast – which estimates the number of people traveling over the holiday weekend – will return next year.”
Hope so. Interesting choice of verbs, “undermined.” That perfidious virus.
As recently as February, I’d toyed with the idea of going somewhere for Memorial Day, since I’m always toying with those kinds of ideas. Soon, events put paid to them, which never even rose to the level of plans. We’ll be among those staying home over the weekend.
At least it’ll be warm and…
Oh, well. Any healthy day is good enough. That’s always true, but we usually disregard it.
Another Easter activity of ours: a long walk. Lots of people can say that. The pandemic has done more for getting people out on the sidewalks than anything I can think of, at least here in a suburb that has sidewalks.
Easter Sunday happened to be warmish this year, especially when compared to Easter Monday. By late in the evening on Monday, it was already down around freezing, headed for a morning low today of 28 F. Bah.
At about noon today, there was snow. At least it didn’t last long and it didn’t stick.
Back to Sunday. In the afternoon, we went to the Arthur L. Janura Forest Preserve, also known as the Poplar Creek Forest Preserve. All of us, including the dog.
That’s only one section of a much larger property, which is part of the Cook County Forest Preserve District. Fortunately the state hasn’t ordered such places closed, though various events in the district have been cancelled. Such an order would be nonsensical, considering how much social distancing you can do in such a large expanse, but some jurisdictions don’t seem to have much sense.
A modified version of the map.
We walked from the parking lot (circled in red) along the paved path (in white) until we got roughly to where I’ve put a red octagon. From there, we headed overland to the banks of Poplar Creek (the next octagon) and then followed the creek along its curve, reaching roughly the position of the third octagon. We returned more or less the same way. Looks long, but I don’t think the walk was more than a mile and a half round trip.
There on Poplar Creek, it’s hard to believe you’re in a metro area of 9 million or so — except for the traffic on Golf Road. Not visible, but audible, even if the sound is a little diminished in these pandemic days. The creek, fairly full from spring rain, gurgled along.
Poplar Creek is a tributary, ultimately, of the Fox River, which feeds the Illinois River. That in turn flows to the Mississippi. So the water we saw was destined, mostly, for that mighty river and the far-away Gulf.
The route was muddy and sometimes strewn with fallen branches and rocks. The grass and weeds and other foot-level plants are greening nicely, while the trees and bushes are getting their start, but haven’t caught up yet.
I think dog thoroughly enjoyed her walk, tramping through the mud, sniffing everything she could, and chewing on blades of grass when we paused. We didn’t have such a bad time either, momentarily away from shelter in place.
Yesterday evening, rain was forecast possible and clouds rolled along.
Temps were a pleasant 70 F. or so. I sat on the deck and waited for the rain. Mostly I saw cloud-to-cloud lightning a few miles away to the south, which has a fascination all its own. It was never near enough to drive me inside, and not much rain came either by dark.
Today was a different story. Just before 5 p.m., heavy rain started to fall. With some hail. Luckily not too large, but enough to make a tink! sound when it hit a metal yard ornament in our front yard. Hail, or at least its streaks, is visible against the backdrop of a neighbor’s house.
When I was 11 or 12, golfball-sized hail fell as I watched from our kitchen window. The ice slammed into the yard and bounced every which way. It was over in two minutes. A minute? Not long, but impressive. I collected a few and kept them in the freezer until they merged with the other frost. It was Texas hail. You know, bigger like everything else.
December didn’t arrive with a blast of snow, but instead gray skies that gave up rain from time to time, which — by Sunday just after dark — had turned into light snow. In other words, weather like we’ve had much of the time since the Halloween snow fell, followed by the Veterans Day snow.
Come to think of it, we had Palm Sunday snow this year. Seems like a year for named-day snows. But no Thanksgiving snow. Or Absence of Color Friday snow (well, maybe).
Took no pictures of 2019 Thanksgiving dinner. Will there be a time when it’s socially mandatory to take a picture of every special-event or holiday meal? Or every meal? Sounds like a small component of dark tale you’d see in Black Mirror.
This year’s meal looked pretty much like this plate — same kind of fish bought from the same place — and was just as good, with the food prepared mostly by my daughters’ skilled hands. Chocolate creme pie for dessert, also from a store, and one we’ve enjoyed before. I did all cleanup, a multi-pan, multi-dish, many-utensil effort, but worth it.
It hasn’t just been cold for November since Monday, temps have been reaching into the realm of damn cold, briefly dropping below zero Fahrenheit early this morning, or maybe into imaginary numbers. Later in the day, it reached a balmy 25 degrees or so. Bah.
It’s a major early winter weather event, now gripping much of the nation. Guess that means I’m a part of something larger than myself. They say that’s important for self-esteem, or happiness, or something, but I don’t think weather events count toward that sense of belonging.
Also, northern Illinois got about three inches of snow on Monday. Not the first time I’ve seen Veterans Day-Armistice Day snow, but more fell than in 2013. At least we didn’t get hit with something along the lines of the Armistice Day blizzard of 1940 or the Big Blow of 1913, both of which showed the power of the Witch of November.
Mid-afternoon. Of course, it will melt in a day or two.
I’ve spent a fair number of Halloweens in the North; this is the first time snow has fallen. Cold rain, sometimes, but no snow. Sometimes warm fall days or blustery cool ones, like the Halloween of 2001, when Lilly was so unnerved by the dark and the strong winds while out trick-or-treating that she insisted that I carry her home. She wasn’t quite four, so it was possible — but tiring.
Speaking of Halloween, I’ve been listening to “Danse Macabre” lately.
In high school, I made the mistake of calling the piece “Halloween music” in front of my band director. He let me have it. It’s a tone poem! It’s serious music from France! It’s blah blah blah. Know what, Mr. W? I was right. It can be all those other things and Halloween music as well. Halloween as in spirits roaming our world before All Hallow’s, not the candy-gathering custom.
The last place we visited during the recent Virginia trip was the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in the Shockoe Bottom neighborhood of Richmond.
A small, specialized museum not in a house that Poe lived in — one of the places he lived was a few blocks away, long demolished — but including a building that is suitably old. In fact, according to a plaque on the wall, the oldest house still standing in Richmond, the Ege House.
All in all, an interesting little museum. Ann thought so too. I found out things I didn’t know, such as that Poe was a gifted athlete at the University of Virginia. Also heard more about things I did know, such as that after Poe died, his enemy Rufus Griswold wrote damning and largely false accounts of the author — vestiges of which still cling to Poe.
The museum is essentially three rooms: Poe’s early life, which was haunted by Death; Poe’s literary career, which was informed by Death; and Poe’s early and mysterious death, which was literally about Death. Some of the artifacts were owned by Poe or his family, or were portraits of them. Other items evoked his life and literature.
Such as this marble-and-bronze memorial to Poe.
The sign says, “… Edwin Booth, on behalf of the actors of New York, presented this monument to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1885 in memory of Poe…” Eventually, I guess, the Met got tired of it, and it ended up in Richmond.
Or this bust of Pallas, a copy of a Roman sculpture. Can’t call yourself a Poe museum without that, though a depiction of Night’s Plutonian Shore would be good as well.
Poe himself in stone out in the garden.
The garden is a pretty little space. People get married there, apparently.
My own favorite item.
I haven’t seen The Raven, but a movie with Vincent Price and Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson, directed by Roger Corman, who did a lot of Poe-inspired movies, has to be worth a look.
Off the main path is a path to Bode Lake.
Looks frozen over, but I bet the ice is pretty thin, so no walking on the lake unless you’re a small creature. No ice fishing either. If that’s the price of a mild winter, I don’t mind.
