Thursday Afternoon

The north wind is blowing once again and it’s cold out there.  Damn cold.  It’s so cold that it hurts your face if it’s exposed to the wind.  One has to practice the ancient art of “bundling up” when outside but you also add the art of “covering up” as well.  The weather isn’t fit for man nor beast.  I made sure that the bird feeders had seed and the bunny feed dish was full as well.  They don’t have the luxury of a fireplace like I do.

I’ve always wondered why January was so cold.  It’s never made sense to me.  If the winter solstice is in December and that’s when the northern hemisphere was tilted the furtherest away from the sun then it would make sense to me that that should be the coldest time of the year; but it’s not.  Not for central Minnesota anyway.  So why is January so much colder when the tilt is going back and we are headed back into the sun?

I dunno.  What I do know is it is cold when I’m outside for my walks.  The wind is blowing the snow and reshaping the piles of snow just like the wind blows the sand on a beach and reshapes the sand dunes.  The tracks that I made in the snow this morning are mostly gone with the snow either blowing away or filling in the imprints of the bottom of my pack boots.

This is when winter is at its hardest on your soul.