on thursday morning, steve did his usual morning chicken routine, and found one of our girls limping badly. of course, it was clove. clove of the infant case of pasty butt. clove of the swallowed plastic garden tag that made her cough up blood. clove of the still undiagnosed mid-winter ailment that caused her to stand in one place, feathers puffed and staring into the middle distance. clove our fragile one. our big-hearted gentle one. she has spent the last three days and nights with us in the living room, next to the fireplace, in a dog kennel, making soft sweet sounds, and still limping badly, but, as of tonight, we think, possibly limping a little less badly than last night. our hearts are full to have her around for a while, like a daughter home from college, but our hearts are a little bit broken, too, to watch her halt across the living room floor to chase down morsels of apple and, ok, i’ll admit it, small slices of pyrenees sheep cheese from our appetizer plate. we are the worst chicken farmers ever.

wild cucumber vine wreath

tanglewood drive, shoreview, minnesota

after feeling that i was tricked out of a november by the weather, it appears i will get my november after all. it will just take place over the month of december. after the upcoming weekend of 40 degree weather, all of our snow will have melted. it looks as if this cup nest may melt away along with it. if so, i hope the yellow warbler who built it will be back next spring. and that april doesn’t trick me, and give me march instead.

yellow warbler nest

our backyard, shoreview, minnesota

 in my past life as an aviation engineer, i once sat through a seminar analyzing a catastrophic aviation failure. the chances of the event’s occurrence were calculated at ten-to-the-minus-six. in an attempt to help us visualize what ten-to-the-minus-six meant, the instructor asked us to imagine five wooden tinkertoy wheels. one wheel represented weather, one represented pilot error, one represented a first redundancy mechanical failure, one represented a secondary redundancy mechanical failure, etc. in order for the airplane to crash, all five tinkertoy wheels had to fall into perfect alignment simultaneously in such a way that a tinkertoy stick could thread cleanly through all five center holes. hoar frost is not a ten-to-the-minus-six event. maybe it only needs the three tinkertoy wheels of clear sky, proper air temperature, and correct amount of wind to align. but it is rare enough, and welcome enough, that i felt i had to celebrate its appearance this morning by taking my first, and possibly only, still blog photo with an iphone. shhh. don’t tell anyone.

hoar frost

island lake trail, shoreview, minnesota

this sheet of ice along the shore of sucker creek had originally frozen tight to the water beneath it, but then it underwent a funny freeze-thaw cycle, that must have involved water droplets forming on the underside of the ice when the weather warmed, then freezing in droplet form, which served as the places where subsequent water droplets chose to drip when the temperature warmed again. on a related topic, which you will not perhaps perceive immediately as related, there is a french cookware company called staub, which is a slightly nerdier version of le creuset. on the underside of the beautifully engineered lids of staub sauce pans and dutch ovens, there are little rounded bumps called “basting spikes,” which focus the condensation from cooking, and drip that moisture evenly back onto the dish that is being cooked. so when i say that my eleven year old son, who is a budding gourmand, took one look at this sheet of ice, and said, “hey, that looks like a staub cocotte,” you will know just how weird, and just how correct, his observation was. i make no apologies, but don’t tell his grandparents.

ice formed at the edge of a creek when temps hovered around freezing

sucker creek, saint paul, minnesota

i’ve been feeling a little like this cottonwood lately, hanging out there between earth and sky, between water and land, between fall and winter, between minnesota and france, between still blog and, well, whatever will come after still blog. i like the creative tension that comes with being somewhere in transition between certainties, but it’s tiring. i’m getting ready to be a fish, not a frog, an oak not a cottonwood, a blade of grass, not a reed. but not quite yet.

cottonwood tree branches hanging over a snow covered lake

sucker lake, saint paul, minnesota