Mandy posted a photo of Ruff the kitten in his first snow in an earlier post, so I thought I’d add these two photos I took with my cell phone camera in the last couple weeks. We do likes our catses.

The cold snap finally broke. We stayed cold until Christmas eve, then the temperature rose, and rose, and rose. Christmas was still white, because the 9″ of snow had compacted to about 7″. But that was Thursday. On Friday we rose to the high 40s and on Saturday we hit record highs in the high 50s to 60 deg F in some areas. Saturday morning dawned dense and foggy, and that lasted through the wee hours of Sunday morning.

Now it’s back down to below freezing, and the wind chill was intense this morning as I walked over to feed and let loose the East Flock. Brrrrrrrr!! Sunny, beautiful colors, gray snow clouds on the horizon, a wonderful winter day.

During this December thaw, I found that the remains of the pokeberries along our path to the East Flock had brightened the remaining snow with their purple blessings. The pokeberry stems are a favorite of our chickens, although we never feed them the poisonous berries. It seems that they avoid the berries on their own (at least Mike never ate them when she was living outside and away from the others in the East Flock last summer), but the stalks have less of the poison and they like that fleshy green stalk. But the only time we see good pokeberry stain on the snow is when we get a good cold snap in November or December, early and cold enough to freeze the berries hard, and followed by a good snow. We need both of those to set it up, so that when the thaw comes, the berries can thaw and drip their winedark juices onto the snow before the snow all melts away. You, of course, must be out tromping in the pokeberry snow in order to see the pokeberry thaw. This photo from my phone camera simply doesn’t do the scene justice.

Then there’s the path itself. Tis but a footpath for us to travel 200 yards to the East Flock, but during the cold snap snow we find that our footprints cross and run with with rabbit highways, squirrel dartings, vole pokeholes, cat prowlings and deer trails, seeking shelter in the sumac and raspberries that line the path. Today as I hid my ears from the wind chill, I almost didn’t look down at my feet to see the red wonders lying all around me. There in the path were the red sumac berries blown down by this wind. My fingers froze, but I stopped to take a couple pictures of the berries and the sumac in the wind. In the background of the sumac photo you can see two of our dead ash trees out in the field, killed like all our ashes by the Emerald Ash Borer sometime before we moved in. The last of them is an enormous ash with a 10′ circumference near our driveway, not quite dead yet but on its last legs. We’ll let them season a bit more in place before cutting them for our fireplace, probably next fall.

Now I’ve taken too long writing this instead of going outside. Mandy’s been working through the wind damage to the cold frames in the garden. It’s so NICE writing by the wood stove though! But blue sky doesn’t come everyday. I’ll go cut down a dead elm, and split some of the remaining unsplit elm that awaits me in the garden. Wind chill be damned.