The wind tastes faintly of Winter’s crispness; daylight is shading toward Winter clarity. Heavy morning frost has become a regular visitor, persisting in the shaded nooks throughout the day and leaving the faintest impression of early snow in the darkest, deepest crannies where daylight scarcely reaches. Pine limbs greet the day coated with frost, sparkling in the dawn as if decorated for the season by the hand of God. Small puddles are frozen over each morning, while larger bodies of water appear merely cold and uninviting as they nurture an accumulating edge of rime along their shores, patiently awaiting the grace of an inevitable sheen of real ice.
But the ground is not yet hardened; not all of the migratory birds have flown south; daily temperatures still rise past crispness into the range of the notionally warm; plants have yet to turn into black, wintry pulp and still bravely wave their fading colors at the winds; more than a few trees hang on fiercely to the leaves remaining to them; and humanity goes about its endeavors in slim silhouette, as yet decrying the bulk of winter coats and gloves and boots – even as each of these items has begun to stir from its hibernation within the closets of Humptulips County, has begun to beckon slowly and seductively.
For it is but the cusp of Winter. Winter’s spare and careful truths still lies weeks away.
But Winter’s annual harbinger now feeds in the valley’s flat places. Snow geese have come south in their seeming thousands, stopping at the midpoint of their annual migration to rest and feed in the valley’s now fallow fields, searching for the fallen grain, for the roots, for the remaining grasses. They scavenge in agitated white flocks, separated from one another in their respective fields of choice by some incomprehensible sense of family, carpeting the ground and appearing in their movements as if wind-blown spume left behind at low tide upon a lonely, deserted beach by an unseen, unheard, far distant surf. They move to the rhythm of life, coruscating in the sunlight.
They are the promise of winter – even though they will be far away when it finally arrives.
