too cold for words

How do you gauge the coldness of a winter day?

For me, it's simple: it's beyond cold when no one wants to spend any amount of time at all outdoors.

Sure, there are things that require it. People have to get to work. Too many have to labor outside in the dead of winter. Here, at the farmette, compassion would have it that I should check in on the cheepers, put out food for them, refill their electrically heated water dish, pick up the egg that will freeze and crack if I delay. So I bundle up and, despite the horrors of the day, I head out.


I must admit it: the delicate sunshine is  beautiful!






We're at -5F in the morning, which is just about -21C. Ed reminds me that there have been colder days. I agree that there have been colder days. Nonetheless, today is really cold. I do not linger.











Once inside the farmhouse, I sit back and allow myself to thaw (surely everything inside is frozen solid).

But after breakfast...






...as I work in the kitchen and look outside, I'm charmed by the birds that fly into, around, and under our crab apple trees, in search of comfort foods...






And then again, I am charmed by the burnt orange of the setting sun...





I suppose it would have to be dangerously cold for me to bypass those very brief saunters out the door to capture these images. It's not dangerously cold (unless you're young or old or thinly clad).

But oh, does it feel menacingly bitter cold out there!

Time to take out the yellow soup pot and get to work on a good old fashioned Italian bean soup for supper.


I want briefly to come back to the topic of blog moods. It does often appear, here on Ocean, that I breeze through the day without a care or without sadness. Not so. I'm lucky enough not to really feel anger. But there do come days when I fight off feeling thrown off by something that happens in my day. These are the challenging moments.

Ed is a solid rock: he, to my knowledge, does not indulge sadness. Oh, hearing stories on the news upsets him, but personal hurts? He wont give in to them. He'll shrug and remind me that personal happiness depends on what you create in what life you have.

And this is why, as I sit down to write, I feel confident in stating -- it was a good day! Calm, steady, reflective.