Solstice count

Early morning light on the formations

 

So it's been a few weeks. This semester (I will spend my life dividing the year into semesters, which, when you think about it, is Not Normal) was the most hectic yet since we loaded up the covered wagon and moved to this prairie outpost. Sometimes it's difficult to know where, if anywhere, the fixed points of our orbits are.

 

The constancy of change is nowhere clearer than in the drylands and flatscapes of the prairies. We have shifted our annual Christmas Bird Count focus to Badlands National Park and surrounding areas, and this is a lovely and somber region indeed at the winter solstice. The light slants low; it blazes up and dies down quickly, like a small fire on bone-dry wood.

 

It was a day for deep, peaceful silences, cracking ice, a light so brilliant that everything seemed illuminated from within. It was not a day for flocks of birds. This is South Dakota. In winter. Birds aren't stupid. Most of them headed out over a month ago, late this year. Everything that could hide or hibernate did so, leaving us to the colors of winter grasses, tall formations, and ice. The bighorn sheep joined us all day, moving down to marginally warmer grazing.

 

In short, it was prairie magic.

 

 

 

Bright light and deep shadows

  

Two-track leading to formation. Eventually. Not in a straight line.

  

Vintage survivor facing the sunrise.

  

Low formation

  

Curve of the frozen river

  

Timelessness

  

Truck, Interior, SD

  

Smiling playground...thing....Interior, SD

  

One-legged cowboy

  

The zombie apocalypse will at least have semi-live entertainment in Interior

  

I am still not sure what is going on with this formation 

Bicycle wheel

  

Mule deer on the move

 

Major ears on these things

 

Silent tracks

 

Bighorn being cool

 

Deep mud cracks and ice. It has been a fiercely dry year.

 

House, Interior

 

Jail, Interior 

It is just like us to oversleep and miss the coyote calling contest by a week. That was no doubt a highlight of the social season.

 

Dad 

Junior. Seems late in the year for one this small....

 

Patriarch at the side of the road

 

Wary watchfulness

 

Sweep of the river. We saw a short-eared owl flying across this in its own sweeps, but it never got close enough for a good picture.

Conata Road in gold light

 

Cabin

 

Sunset behind the Black Hills

Here's hoping everyone found time during the holidays to tap into that same deep peace and silence.

To Autumn

  John Keats (1795-1821)

                                 

1.

    Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 

        Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; 

    Conspiring with him how to load and bless 

        With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; 

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, 

        And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; 

            To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 

    With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, 

 And still more, later flowers for the bees, 

        Until they think warm days will never cease, 

            For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

       2.

    Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? 

        Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find 

    Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, 

        Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; 

Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, 

        Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook 

            Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: 

    And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep 

        Steady thy laden head across a brook; 

        Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, 

            Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

 3.

    Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? 

        Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— 

    While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, 

        And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue; 

 Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn 

        Among the river sallows, borne aloft 

            Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; 

    And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; 

         
   

        Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft 

        The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; 

           And gathering swallows twitter in the skies

Equinox

 Leaving September

If I have once forgotten on this field
The long light of the dusk, or far away

The sheep on tawny grass, how stones will yield
Small bitter puffballs, or a cricket stay

To wring wry tunes from emptiness and dearth,
Let me remember; let me hold them now

Close to the heart--while I upon the earth
Am the stone field and pain the heavy plow.

Not in wide measures is the harvest culled;
Not by disaster nor by cutting hail

 

 

Is the loss seen, the grief is somewhat dulled--

Being done at last. Ours is a different scale--
Leaving September stars and a little smoke
And memory tight as a lichen to an oak.
--Loren Eiseley