Today's count.

Mom with twins under 2' in the Bowl.  Twin stroller, and twin with stroller - pink.  Little grey floppy sunhats.  No sun.  Grey shirts, green shorts, blue shorts.  Flowers blooming.  Others on the lawn and walking the circuit fill out the scene.

Oh... there goes the blanket folding.  Lunch break is over.

The delicacies of a January Thaw

Admittedly we have not had much winter in recent years.  But this year we have seen the high end of the -30s.  Of course that's cold end of the thermometer, so that's the low 30s?  It confuses the brain at times.  But we all agree it's cold.  But today, it is not cold.  And with little snow to show for our season, now running into its third month, we have earth showing, and bits of grass.  I reached out to touch the delicate yellow green needles of a tamarack and found them as soft now as they are in the spring.  They peeled off into my palm and I raised them to my nose to inhale.  Sweet: earth and spring and warmth and peaceful afternoons.

Today's count

January in the imaginary age of climate change.  Two boys (that's just what they are in their twenties) out in the bowl playing Frisbee- in their shirt sleeves.  Puddles and the wind ruffling them like little lakes. The rising walls of a great white castle.  Bucket after bucket of snow packed around and then the chinks between the smooth forms filled.  It is in my view now, alone after the completion of construction.  A good four feet high.  The last row of bucket shapes showing like crenelation around its top. My ornamental asparagus putting out more shoots, climbing the window under the sun which has finally cleared the tops of the buildings opposite. A sun that goes down, as well roll away from it, almost an hour later than it did a month ago at the solstice.  Winter: more and more light.

A.E. Matheson 2016

Today's count

The scent of wine from fallen leaves.  Rescuing a ladybug off the bus. Warm enough to take off socks. Horse feather clouds across the blue.  A girl with purple hair.  A swarm of graceful green robed people crossing the bowl - most likely the Greystone Singers.  The sound of a child outside the library, clearly setting eyes on the T-Rex for the first time. Wooooohooowwoooo.

Today's Count

A spectacular dust devil, probably one foot in diameter showing itself as it crossed the bowl only in the flower beds.  Tree buds opening and thickening day by day, making shadows fulsome. Butterflies.  Birds practicing their calls. A man in a rainbow Afro wig, and a lime coloured car the shape of a box.

Yesterday's Count

Sun, warmth, my bike, the smell of the earth, equal day and night - 7:15 am to 7:15 pm, and little gophers.  Deep breath and relax.

Today's Count: little red dress

I biked today.  I biked yesterday, the first time this entire year.  That little flavour of normalcy. The sun wanders across a blue deep enough to drown in and turns the stones of the campus buildings honey gold and yellow.  After a cold snap we are enjoying fall.  A real fall, all warm and yellow and blue and breezy like a caress.  And red dresses.  I saw the first one as I rounded out from behind the construction site that has been made of the forest near Arts.  White and red, like a dress from the Wizard of Oz, colour come out of the black and white sequences.  Light on the wind, it swayed.  It was hanging from the tall elms of the avenue of elms that lead to the bowl.  Then I saw another, and another.  The first was the only one with white. All the others were red, bright, deep, black, silk, linen, rayon, cotton, smooth, rough, embroidered, beaded, long, short, wide skirted, slim, open backed, high necked.  All adorning hangers strung with fishing wire from the trees and swaying in the breeze.  What do they mean, asked a young co-worker.  What do you think they mean?  She wasn't sure.  We were at an art gallery last week which displayed and explained its display of paper glued together in blocks.  Left me cold.  But red dresses hanging in the daylight, every variation of women:  red, texture, passion, death, bleeding, restriction, beauty, strength, silent, loud, brilliant, flexible, tethered, but moving.  This has meaning.  And through this meaning walked students and profs, the small colourful people from the daycare, the green velveted university choir.  And me.

Today's count

Four tiny pink people, will little pink hats.  One tiny green person, with a little pink hat. On the big green lawn.  One big blue person, with no hat. Oh look they have been joined by a teeny tiny blue person with a green hat, and a very tall white and black person - with no hat.  For shame with our big examples.

Yesterday's count:  Waiting for the bus, four houses for sale - if you have 2 mil to loose you can buy all four, one dignified woman in her little go machine with her shirtless male companion standing on the running board and driving, and her little dog, Cleopatra style in the basket.

Today's Count

Five adults, eyes lowered, fascinated, moving slowly, while a tiny creature, just barely surpassing dad's knee and eschewing the carriage on offer, demonstrated it could walk (and vocalize) all on its own: thanks very much.

Today's count

violets from friends in the season of robins

Housebound for nearly two weeks.  A friend who brought in groceries. A friend who called to cheer me in my captivity.  A friend who resupplied my pile of murder mysteries from the library (I recommend Kerry Greenwood's Corrina Chapman.). A friend who, all unknowing, send me a postcard that arrived today and brightened the afternoon.  A friend who, learning of my state, came with supper and then washed all the dirty dishes in the house. The generosity of caring:  worth more than any gold.

Today's count

Purple, yellow, sage green, orange, blue sky, the rattle of my ancient bicycle on hard ground and the sweep of my feet and pedals though the tall hard prairie grass, then into the rain cool shadows of pines, out again and past the wild wind waving aspen leaves.

Today's Count

A blue sky, a brisk morning, cool enough upon setting out to warrant long pants (not jeans) and a light sweater.  Upon return a desire for shorts and the sweater swinging from my left hand.  A small moccasin complete with beading and bunny fur waiting by the side of the sidewalk for its little owner to come back for it.  Suzie, rescued from somewhere up north and fully recovered from a nasty encounter with a car.  Bright of eye, and keen to have her faced rubbed along her cheek bones and her ears stroked.  A stone path brilliantly laid across the corner of a newly landscaped lawn.  If you can't make them stop cutting across your lawn, build them a path.  A student who studies regularly in my library going to class.  "Morning."  A bird's nest.  Nestled on the cross beam of a walkway arch.

Today's count

Four horses, three barn cats, a house cat, three dogs, several chickens, twenty one abandoned (mostly by a neighbouring farmer while the property was under the care of its previous owner) out buildings.  I am helping the friend of a friend build a coop for the chickens. One guinea hen escaped and has been making various forays over the barn roof, through the horse pasture and up trees.  Generally making her presence known to the local fox.  Her friend, the other guinea hen, has already been on the menu.  The glory of the day was watching the fox, hell bent for leather across the yard and out of sight behind the barn with one of my friend's dogs in hot and joyous pursuit.  The fox had forgotten that the visiting dogs, unlike the farm dog, could actually see it.

Yes, I do prefer this kind of vacation to a beach in Jamaica.

Today's Count

Ah sweet mystery of life at last you found us.  Spring.  Today it is here.  I sensed it yesterday, but today it is here.  It is not just the sun, we have, blessings, seen that daily now for almost a week.  It is not the puddles, they have been increasing over the week; the snow has only so much cold to keep the burning sun at bay.  It is, possibly the temperature combined with the sun, and the size of the puddles.  Or it could be that I walked on a patch of grass for the first time since October.  Brown, bent, soaked, but grass, with real soil beneath it.

Today's Count

My yellow spring/fall jacket, a pink grey sky with a pale yellow glow, and amid the degas and snakes, frogs and fish, about thirty little small creatures in bright orange t-shirts two sizes too large for them, so focused on their observations that the sudden influx of a couple hundred students changing classes through the museum area makes no impression on them at all.

Today's count

February and last week it was ski pants and extra mitts.  Today the sky is blue with passing clouds and it is sweaters and fall jackets.  Scraped snow has dissolved into wet patches on the pavement, and more people are looking upward than usual.  It seems at least for today, those rodents didn't see their shadows on Saturday.

Yesterday's count

A great blue bowl above as I sat in the Bowl of the U of S in the afternoon sunshine, my great coat open, my eyes up and upon the delicate branches of the elms, turned white in the sunlight, and the sounds of the little people climbing the snow mountains at the far end of the Bowl and screaming their glee as they charged up and slid down.

today's count

Geese gone grey in a misted sky, a magpie heard but not seen above me, the heavy comforting silence of student empty paths, the distant call of construction trucks, water bomb droplets from passing elms, a chubby pocked snowman in the bowl, and the silent giants of memorial contemplation planted in 1967.

Today and yesterday's count

Yesterday in the afternoon sunshine seven brightly coloured children, pink and green and turquoise, bravely in the sun in their hats, did what children have always done if allowed, invented a game using what comes available.  These seven had found a large-ish branch off a poplar tree and used it as a pony on which most could ride, to charge up the slope, then it changed into a toboggan and they slide down again.  The sky was blue, the day was warmly hot, and I was able to pick crabapples from my favourite  tree after all.  A pie is in the offing.  Today I went to the far side of the crabapple grove and entered the path to the Education prairie garden.  There a large brown and green dragonfly landed on my leg.  But it tickled and I started, and he flew away.

Today's count

A perfect pre-fall day.  Pre-fall I say because fall is my favourite season, unless it is spring, and visa versa, and a sign that the heat and stickiness of this summer may finally be over is a blessing and a bliss to me.  I wore jeans the other day.  Sigh.  Today though it is blue with wispy clouds which send forward messages of distant rain, and a breeze which made a light sweater over my sleeveless shirt quite comfortable.  I walked not to the crabapple grove but down between the buildings in the tree lined avenue to watch the geologist setting up spikes in the bowl where they are doing a sub something on the ground there.  I think she meant under the grass.  There being much under the grass: gophers, plumbing, electrical tunnels, soil, dirt (which I am told are most certainly NOT the same thing), tree roots, and a monstrous, and as far as my brain storage information goes, number of unknown and uncatalogued weeny beasts of all kinds.  (Wow, that was almost a proto Dickensian sentence.*)

*In one of my copies of one of what-his-name's books I found the entire first page was a sentence.  Dicken's blog says he once counted one that was 21 lines long.