Yesterday a guy showed up on Hyde Park Ave with a jackhammer to smash up the two-plus inches of solid ice on the sidewalk.

Boskone this coming weekend. I’ll be at a Beneath Ceaseless Skies reading at 8:30 PM on Friday 12:00 PM on Sunday to read from my forthcoming (non-centaur) story, “The Nine-Tailed Cat”. And who knows what else through the weekend. Pretty likely the Harpoon Brewery tour on Sat. afternoon…. then before dawn Monday morning I’m off for Guatemala again. Lots to do until then. Little time for blog lately, I fear. No doubt there will be insane travel ranting and photography when I get back. See you then. Unless I see you at the con!

Sitta canadensis, Arnold Arboretum conifers section

This guy is a bit north of his range for the season.

Happy new year.

Serendipity has been circumventing my attempts to celebrate the winter solstice in any true style for several years in a row. This year I get to spend the 21st on a plane. I hope I have a window seat.

The other day I was walking on River Road in Sunderland at around one in the afternoon, getting towards the end of our first big snow storm. The precipitation had turned to a fine sleet, and underfoot were four inches of snow topped by an inch and a half of hard slush. I followed other people’s footprints when I could, but mostly they’d been left hours ago and had healed over with ice.

I was walking by a gap between farmhouses when I heard something from the big, empty field behind them. Music. A couple of chords played on a big ole synth pipe organ, strung together into part of a melody. The sequence repeated itself once, then ceased. I wasn’t sure if I’d really heard it, so I stood there in the iced-over driveway for a minute, looking around at the clapboards and the maple trees for a light in a window, an open garage door. Something that might hint at the source of the sound. Nobody was out.

After a minute I heard whoever it was play through the same half-melody once more. I recognized it, but couldn’t place it. Maybe it was part of a Christmas song. I wanted to figure out how I knew it, and who was playing it.

Fairies? Angels? The Dead?

I turned away from the road, between the farmhouses and into the field, into the wind, the wet ice coming down on my face, turning it numb. Straight ahead over the pines and hemlocks at the far side of the field were the profile of Mt. Toby and the Bull Hill bluffs. Left, a church spire—no, it was the tower of the Blue Heron. The building had been town hall once, but never a church. No synth organ music issued from any of the above. I didn’t hear it again.

The wool coat I had on was getting close to soaked-through. I gave up, turned south over the crunching, sopping-wet fields towards home.

I figured out how to take halfway decent pictures of birds in the cherry and shag birch trees outside my kitchen even with screens in the way. I realize they are just your run of the mill songbirds, but around this time of February, with the snow piled as high as it is and not much sign of letting up, even silent winter songbirds start looking pretty interesting. I like the way they get all fluffy when it’s cold.

A Northern Mockingbird, mimus polyglottos

And a Northern Carndinal female.

I also see a lot of jays, bluebirds, dark-eyed juncoes, goldfinches, nuthatches, tufted titmice. Maybe if I really start to go stir crazy I’ll try to take pictures of all of them.

Yeah. I’m a Whistler fan.

Birch and oak near dark.

Shadows of my backyard apple tree by the almost-full moon.

The tree casting the shadow.

Yes, thank you, I am perfectly aware that it’s a kangaroo.

Happy solstice.

I took this Monday at about 6:30 PM in the Southwest. Clockwise, the moon, Jupiter, and Venus.

Obviously the Great Shift is near to hand.

Occasionally, as a matter of probabilities, one must expect to find himself in a snow-fogged graveyard.

About 3 minutes after totality, 10:54 PM.