i spend a lot of time choosing which photos to post, based on whether i can achieve an acceptable white background, without either burning out the white colors, or ending up with an uninteresting blanket of medium gray. sometimes, though, on an overcast day in the northern hemisphere, hours after a freshly fallen snow, mother nature decides to make things easy.

oak leaves in snow

grass lake trail, saint paul, minnesota

i intended to create a subtly holiday-ish swagged garland out of my pinecone collection for the second day of december. but my son took one look and declared that it looked like a head-on shot of an owl in flight, to which my husband replied, no way dude, it’s totally the mandibles of a stag beetle. my daughter is out of the house tonight, taking a test prep class, meaning the estrogen factor stands no chance in this environment against the testosterone factor. and so there you have it. please enjoy this head-on shot of an owl in flight, or possibly the mandibles of a stag beetle, depending on who wins the wrestling match between my fifth grade boy and my adult boy.

pinecone collection

mostly from minnesota and southern france, with a few from california

hello december. i look forward to spending your 31 days focused on such things as the tips of cedar trees and the very early decay of crabapples. i promise to drink lots of early morning tea, and build lots of late afternoon fires. i promise i will not set foot in a shopping mall, or complain at any time in public or in private about the holiday season. in exchange, i expect you to keep things reasonable on your end, with wind chills above zero most days, so i can walk with my dog and celebrate your austere beauty in this blog. deal?

cedar tips and winter crab apples

saint paul, minnesota

feeding chickens in december in minnesota also by definition means feeding squirrels. our girls love their organic layer seed mix, but i’m not sure i can say definitively that they love it more than the local gray squirrel population loves it. the squirrels have now largely abandoned the effortful and time consuming practice of peeling black walnut husks like the one above, and instead have taken up residence inside the chicken run, and occasionally inside the chicken feed bucket. they stare at me from their little bucket house as i approach, weighing risk and reward, and eventually, when i actually open the door to the coop, waddling away sullenly, like an obese uncle at thanksgiving, awakened on the couch in front of the football game and asked to go start the car.

squirrel eaten walnut shell

saint paul, minnesota

i just re-encountered joseph albers this morning, on, of all things, a political blog. his theory is that color is not fixed, and not a wavelength, but a visual perception, full of relativity. in other words, an apple is not red. an apple just happens to be perceived as red, in the light spectrum in which we normally look at apples. but an apple, in different lighting, could be seen as almost any other color. similarly, the snowflake you see above is not a snowflake, but is in fact a balsam tree. or, in other words, the fixed cultural law of  conical-shaped christmas trees is entirely dependent on looking at christmas trees from the perspective of a sitting or standing human being. but to a human being on a ladder, christmas trees, especially after a fresh snowfall, look almost exactly like snowflakes.

balsam fir with snow (top down perspective)

saint paul, minnesota