seasons

MY HOME TOWN – Marilyn Armstrong

/ Marilyn Armstrong / 17 Comments
My Home Town

It’s a small town. Main Street, north and south of Route 16 which crosses Uxbridge down the middle and moves on to other towns.

Thank you, Nancy Merrill, for offering such a great topic for photographs. I have had three home towns: New York, Jerusalem, and Uxbridge. With each change of home, my town has become smaller. There are a lot of issues involved in living in the country, but it beats out any city, at least for us. The beauty of our world is unmatched.

Photo: Garry Armstrong
Photo Garry Armstrong
Photo: Garry Armstrong
Photo: Garry Armstrong
Photo: Garry Armstrong

I wouldn’t mind a movie theatre and a bit more shopping,  but it’s a good and beautiful place to live. Whatever may be wrong with it, we are not spending our lives fighting for parking spaces, driving through endless crowded roads … and coping with the grime and grit of bigger cities.

WEATHER AND WINTER – Marilyn Armstrong

/ Marilyn Armstrong / 18 Comments

Our weather is weird. In the past decade, we’ve had winters where we are buried in 12 feet (about three meters) of snow next to winters where we don’t get any snow — or so little, we never need to shovel. Or this winter where mostly, it has been so warm with a day or two of cold, then more warm weather. We’ve had the rainiest spring, fall, and winter ever recorded or remembered. It’s pouring right now.

Cold Cardinal Monday

It’s late January — and our dogs are picking up ticks. The ground has not frozen.

Two days ago it was -4 Fahrenheit (-20 Celsius) and today, it’s 50 Fahrenheit (10 Celsius) and it’s pouring rain. Three days ago, we got snow and then freezing rain, winding up with an inch of solid ice on everything. It was like cement. Immovable.

Today is Thursday. It’s warm, raining hard, and blowing a gale.  Everything is washing away. Not a bird in sight because the wind is too strong and they dare not fly. The wind is so powerful our 150-foot (46-meter) oak trees are swaying in the wind like grass. Kind of scary because should one of them fall we are underneath the trees. Big trees. Very big.

An early January morning

Germany used to be a cold country. So was Switzerland. Now they get spring and summer before us. Although New England has always had erratic weather patterns, we had seasonal winds and water temperature that was typical year-to-year. We knew where the weather came from and what it meant. Now, we know nothing. The northern storms are not coming down. Our storms are coming up from the south or the west. No more “Montreal Express” to bring down the arctic weather.

How come ticks are alive in January? We’re going to have massive invasions of insects because of how warm it has been through much of what ought to be winter. Parts of our house are damp and beginning to rot from the rain.

The sun from the east

We get cold days, but just a day or two at a time. Then, it warms up overnight and it’s sort of spring again. I don’t mind not having icy roads, but I mind not having seasons! I never thought I’d hear myself say it, but I actually miss the snow.

We’ve always been weak on Spring. We used to laugh that we got exactly enough time to race down to the local department store — when we had department stores — and buy a bathing suit between the last snow and the first daffodils.

This year, we also missed Autumn, the one really good season we get around here.

Are we getting climate change? It would appear we are in the middle of it. The winds are not blowing from the same directions they used to. The ocean is too warm. Birds are not migrating. Bears aren’t hibernating.

What is our world doing about it? Not much.

And eastern morning …

As for the depression that comes with winter darkness, that’s the only thing that hasn’t changed. I write my way through it. I take pictures of birds. It helps.

Writing helps most. It gets dreary in the winter. Dark until well into the morning and dark again long before dinner. We may change the weather, but so far, we have not managed to change the rotation of the earth or how it circles the sun — or tilts towards or away from the burning orb in the middle.

Last March!

Even among the many who believe in climate change, no one has any idea what to do about it. It’s such a big thing and we are little tiny people living in a damaged world.

THE TENACIOUS WEEKEND – Marilyn Armstrong

/ Marilyn Armstrong / 11 Comments
 Holding Fast – Tenacious 
Weekend

Weekends used to speed faster than the mosquito you’re trying to smack. When I was working, there were a few things you knew about them.

1 – You weren’t going to get half the things done you had planned because there weren’t enough hours to fit them into one weekend;
2 – You knew how much you hated your job by how whether you hated it on Friday night or didn’t hate it until Sunday;
3 – Why didn’t people make weekdays an hour and a quarter longer so you could have a three-day weekend?

A three-day weekend was enough time to sleep for one day, do stuff that needed doing on another, and have some fun on the third. That one extra day of not-working was a big deal.

Spring

April canal and river

Towards the end of my working years, much of it was spent working electronically from home, so the pressure to somehow get “everything” done on the weekend was greatly reduced and of course now, retired, I find weekends annoying because offices are closed and I can’t deal with “stuff.” I have to remember to do them on Monday — or Tuesday in case I forget on Monday.

Retirement, after a few years during which you keep time like you used to, starts to be all of a piece. Every day is like every other day. The only reason I have an inkling of which day of the week is passing is that I schedule posts in advance. Also, when I’m planning out bill payments, I need the calendar. And, I need to remember the beginning of the month because that’s when I give the dogs their heartworm medicine.

I check the calendar to see when we have doctors appointments.

Photo: Garry Armstrong – July

August

All of this makes me think about time, calendars, weekdays, weekends. Other than appointments that occur on a specified schedule, do the weekends matter? Are they relevant? Do I care whether it is the ninth of the months or the eleventh? Other than calculating the arrival of our Social Security checks, how does calendar time affect my reality?

Effectively, time barely matters. The seasons’ matter, but I have a better sense of the seasons from being outside and feeling the weather than via the calendar. Summer is longer, winter is long and the in-between seasons — the good time — are much shorter.

September

October

Time slows in winter and the weeks go slowly when you can’t go out much. Winter lasts a long time in New England, especially when the snow begins early and the cold of winter lasts until late.  Birthdays become increasingly less critical as you get older. Not only less critical but sometimes rather unpleasant.

I don’t want to turn 72 in March. I’m pretty sure Garry doesn’t want to become 77 in April and I’m equally sure my son doesn’t yearn to be 50 in May.

First blizzard – January

Meanwhile, today is Sunday. I don’t remember what I did yesterday. I literally don’t remember anything. It came, it went. The weather is cool this weekend, but it will warm up later in the week — and there’s a possible hurricane wandering around the south Atlantic which might have something to do with us, but we aren’t sure.

March

I know it’s the weekend because Colbert and Trevor aren’t on, but football has come again. The Red Sox lost yesterday at home against the Astros. Not good.

So basically, Sunday is a day. On Monday, it will rain.

ABOUT “CLIMATE CHANGE,” WHAT DID YOU EXPECT? Marilyn Armstrong

/ Marilyn Armstrong / 42 Comments

Sunday is Earth Day. I remember the first Earth Day and every Earth Day since. Earth has changed and I’m pretty sure we’re the ones who have changed it.

Pogo – Walt Kelly

This isn’t a trick . It’s a genuine question based on a few premises with which you have to agree before we can begin:

1 – Climate change is real, based on science and facts. It isn’t a glitch in nature and if we ignore it, it won’t go away.

2 – We used to call it “global warming” – but obviously there’s quite a bit more to it.

3 – You are sure it is going to affect you … but exactly how?

4 – You are not a conspiracy theorist. You do not believe that climate change comes from an angry God or some weird technology.

5 – You’d like to know what you should be doing about climate change — and you are pretty sure that recycling bottles is probably not the ultimate answer.

Jan 9, 2018 – Montecito, Santa Barbara County, California, U.S. – KERRY MANN navigates the large boulders and mudflow that destroyed the home of her friend in Montecito. The woman who lives in the home has not been seen since the early hours of Tuesday. At least 15 people died and thousands fled their homes in Southern California as a powerful rainstorm triggered flash floods and mudslides on slopes where a series of intense wildfires had burned off protective vegetation last month. (Newscom TagID: zumaamericasnineteen760940.jpg) [Photo via Newscom]

These are questions for which I don’t have an answer. I have always believed that we were doing serious damage to the earth, even before it was officially proven. I thought it was pretty obvious. We still have pollution resulting from things we did in European river valleys a thousand years ago and these days, we simply make it worse. Even when we are trying to make it better.

The thing is, I know I had no idea what all of this meant on a personal level. I understood about rising sea levels. I got that part of the equation. I understood the increasing and probably endless loss of species — such as all of our large land mammals and probably all or most of our carnivores.

There will be no wolves, no tigers, lions, elephants, rhinoceros, giraffe. Whales will be gone. Slowly but surely because we are polluting the oceans and I don’t know if there is a way back from the mess we have made.

British storm – Ophelia 2018

The air will become more polluted and we will never figure out what to do with our radioactive wastes. We haven’t even figured out what to do with the filthy, polluted soil in this valley or for that matter, the Rhine valley or along the Yangtze or Ganges.

Off the coast of Massachusetts

Storms will be bigger, encompassing the size of entire oceans eventually. Right now, we have storms in North America so big they go literally from coast to coast. Super storms. Super tornadoes. We will have droughts and floods in sequence. Fires and mud slides in between and let’s not forget the occasional earthquake, just for fun.

It rained 30 inches in Hawaii over the past 24 hours and another monster storm is on the way. The concept of “monster storms” never crossed my mind.

Slowly rising sea water is pretty much what I saw in my head. I never imagined it would all be happening at the same time — and so fast. I thought it would take a lot longer for the water to rise. That the oceans would slowly edge up over the coasts. The rivers would rise and  we’d have flooding.

Snow? Maybe we’d have less with rising temperatures … but I didn’t think we’d have storm after storm with warm weather in between so it would fall, then melt, then fall again, and melt again. I didn’t expect the bizarre alterations of seasons, either.

What did you imagine would happen? Did  you imagine the mudslides in California? Or the fires? Or the floods in Puerto Rico and Texas? And now in Kauai?

Did we realize that the melting glaciers would mean that inland nations like Switzerland would have no viable water sources?

What did we think was going to happen? What do we think is going to happen next year and the year after? It won’t be nothing, that’s for sure. Something will happen and we will be in the middle of it. In the end, there will be few places left to hide.

Atlantic nor’easter

 I don’t think my imagination moved me much past a flooded basement. I never considered we might have an entirely flooded valley … or maybe a state under water. Or even finding myself turning up the thermostat in the middle of April.

Since the season is almost here, I implore you to not kill your early blooming dandelions. This is the food the bees need to keep alive until the rest of the flowers and plants bloom. Remember the bees because without them, we are dead, so skip that lovely Scott’s  lawn for now. Let’s try and preserve life on earth rather than the nicest lawn in the suburbs.

Bee in the dandelions

THE CHANGING SEASONS – MARCH 2018 – GARRY & MARILYN ARMSTRONG

/ Marilyn Armstrong / 27 Comments

February ended and we all thought — especially me! — that spring was just around the corner. We’d had a lot of snow in January — with warm weeks in between. We had considerable snow in February — with even warmer weeks in between. This being March, I was waiting for the song of the Carolina sparrow.

THE FIRST STORM – March 2

It was mainly high wind and rain. We got a dusting of snow, but we also got the kind of heavy, drenching rain I usually associate with tropical storms and hurricanes. The first storm, on March 2, lasted almost three days — longer on some places along the shore.

For this “Changing Seasons,” I am here to show you the rest of the winter. Apparently winter was not wintry enough, so anything remaindered landed in March. We had three major nor’easters in less than two weeks.

Photo: Garry Armstrong

There is another possibly on the way, but none of the local meteorologists have quite figured out whether or not it is going to hit us or wander off into the Atlantic.

THE SECOND STORM – March 9

This was another heavy wind event with terribly high tides, massive shore erosion … and about 5 inches of snow, inland. The trees were moving in the wind which is more than a little frightening considering the size of these giant oak trees. The less I looked at them, the happier I was.

We didn’t lose power, but we were lucky. Across New England and New York, more than a million people lost power and some still have not yet been connected.

For all the dull months when we took very few pictures, we made up for it big time in March. Tons of snow, rapid melting. More snow. We don’t live on the coast or I could show you 50 foot high waves pounding the sea walls in Scituate (pron: Si-choo-ate) and everywhere along the cape, but especially in Bourne and Barnstable.

THE BIG ONE – THE THIRD STORM – March 13

The predictions for this one were a little different. A heavy blow of more wind along the shore, but massive quantities of snow for our area. in fact, Worcester won the cup — the most snow in the region.

Just under 28 inches.

Worcester beat out Uxbridge by less than half an inch getting a full 28 inches. We got 27.7 inches. It was a lot of heavy, wet snow. We didn’t get any of the wind and the trees groaned under the weight of the snow hanging in its branches.

Does a school bus count?
The deck
Photo: Garry Armstrong

Digging out

We both took pictures but even so, no one went very far. It was cold, the snow came down for a long, long time — almost 24 hours in total.

Photo: Garry Armstrong

March is by far the most erratic weather month in this region. March came in like a brace of hungry lions. I’m hoping he leaves us gently, trailing flowers. Right now, that seems unlikely.

Not spring quite yet.
Snow busy!

All the early flowers were killed off by the brutal snow that followed the warming period. I think we will go from winter to almost summer during April. That isn’t unusual, either. In fact, it is more typical not otherwise.

Gibbs enjoying the snow

February is usually the worst month for blizzards and really heavy snow, but March takes the cup for 2018. Just because the month is more than half over, it’s too early to stow your winter gear.

The better news is there’s a lot of melting going on when the sun is out. It’s still cold, but not like it was earlier in the winter. We aren’t getting prolonged bouts of below zero (Farenheit) temperatures.

And, then, there was getting around after the snow. The towns are all good at cleaning up. We may not be good at a lot of other things, but we know how to clear the roads.

Photo: Garry Armstrong

Rules — not etched in stone:

Do you want to participate in «The Changing Seasons»?
These are the rules for Version 1 (The Changing Seasons V1):

  • Tag your posts with #MonthlyPhotoChallenge and #TheChangingSeasons
  • Each month, post 5-20 photos in a gallery.
  • Don’t use photos from your archive. Only new shots.

These are the rules for Version 2 (The Changing Seasons V2):

    • Tag your posts with #MonthlyPhotoChallenge and #TheChangingSeasons
    • Each month, post one photo (recipe, painting, drawing, whatever) that represents your interpretation of the month.
    • Don’t use archive stuff. Only new material!

Hosted this year by: Zimmerbitch – Age is just a number

THE CHANGING SEASONS – FEBRUARY 2018

/ Marilyn Armstrong / 28 Comments

As February is ending, it is time for another “Changing Seasons” post. I haven’t gotten the alert, but I’ve been doing this for two years, so I don’t have a problem doing it again.

Connecticut with snow just hours away

It has been a truly dull month for photography. A little bit of snow, a lot of rain. Some very warm, shirtsleeve weather, then a little more snow. February and March are the two most erratic months for weather in this region.

February is often the worst month for blizzards and really heavy snow and just because the month is almost over, it’s much too early to stow your winter gear.

This is one of those weird months where it feels like any number of seasons. Today was springtime. I was outside taking pictures in my dress. Not even a sweatshirt. Garry went out in a hoodie and felt he was overdressed.

Snowy frog on the deck
Snow on the deck

But tomorrow, we’re expecting a few inches (more? less?) of snow.

A chilly gray day

I have not taken many pictures this month. Everything has been boringly grey or mud brown, with a little snow occasionally to brighten it up. Not very exciting for a photographer.

But — some months are not terribly interesting. I’m just grateful we didn’t get three feet of snow!

Rules — not etched in stone:

Do you want to participate in «The Changing Seasons»?
These are the rules for Version 1 (The Changing Seasons V1):

  • Tag your posts with #MonthlyPhotoChallenge and #TheChangingSeasons
  • Each month, post 5-20 photos in a gallery.
  • Don’t use photos from your archive. Only new shots.

These are the rules for Version 2 (The Changing Seasons V2):

    • Tag your posts with #MonthlyPhotoChallenge and #TheChangingSeasons
    • Each month, post one photo (recipe, painting, drawing, whatever) that represents your interpretation of the month.
    • Don’t use archive stuff. Only new material!

Hosted this year by: Zimmerbitch – Age is just a number

THE CHANGING SEASON – YEAR IV – JANUARY 2018 – GARRY & MARILYN ARMSTRONG

/ Marilyn Armstrong / 38 Comments

The Changing Seasons, January 2018

Home during the blizzard

It started with three years of host Cardinal Guzman — Max — who did a wonderful job. I’m so glad Su Leslie has taken over. It has been a great deal of fun to follow the seasons through the years, especially in this region where we have four seasons, but in some years, more like six or seven!

Bonnie and Duke watching the falling snow
Snow through the window
Photo: Garry Armstrong – Blizzard
Woods in winter

Right now, it’s deep winter. Except it has warmed up, the snow has been washed away by two days of pouring rain and today the sun was out and the temperature was up. The climate is changing. You can argue about it all you like, but it is happening anyway. I think it’s more obvious some places than others.

The old tractor

Regardless, January is not much of an outdoor month. It’s cold, frequently snowy, with warm breaks and mud between the storms.

And one birthday party

The Duke

Bonnie and Gibbs

Garry took all of the outdoor  shots in the blizzard. Mine are entirely indoors. I don’t seem to have quite the energy to get “out this and into the weather” these days.

RULES OF THE SEASONS

The Changing Seasons Version One (photographic):

  • Each month, post 5-20 photos in a gallery that you feel represent your month
  • Don’t use photos from your archive. Only new shots.
  • Tag your posts with #MonthlyPhotoChallenge and #TheChangingSeasons so that others can find them

The Changing Seasons Version Two (you choose the format):

  • Each month, post a photo, recipe, painting, drawing, video, whatever that you feel says something about your month
  • Don’t use archive stuff. Only new material!
  • Tag your posts with #MonthlyPhotoChallenge and #TheChangingSeasons so others can find them.