I've always found it virtually impossible to take accurate pictures of the mountain distances. The camera never seems to see the colors, forms, and depths as my eye thinks it sees them. Still: we stopped in a parking lot on the road into Blowing Rock to look at the view toward Grandfather Mountain, and if you can't actually see the drama I saw, maybe you can imagine it.
The February spring is always fleeting. Yesterday, down here, it was nearly 70 degrees, and I was hot in a cotton cardigan and leggings. But everywhere in the mountains snow was still lying wherever there was the least bit of shade. Along the Blue Ridge Parkway, Sims Pond and Julian Price Lake both wore skins of ice. We didn't do nearly as much walking as we had envisioned; instead we drove up and down for a while looking at the cold scenery, then decamped to the restaurant, where we ate in the bar, which is always my favorite thing, for some reason. I like eating dinner at the bar –– again, I don't know why, but I love doing it –– but my husband does not, so we waited for a bar table to be vacated and dove upon it. Anyway, it was fun, and it's not like I ever mind being out and having dinner brought to me, wherever I happen to be sitting.
As I say, the February spring is fleeting. You have to get out and fairly bathe in it while you have it, because you can't count on its still being there when you wake up the next day. Today it's cold and gray again, though the daffodils continue to open.
I found moss growing on this old burl, if that's what it is, from the pecan tree we took down last summer. I don't know if pecan wood does burl the way walnut does, but we have some of these odd whorled chunks of its wood lying around, and now this one is growing moss.
We're off to Mass shortly. I'd been thinking that I wanted to wear something that felt particularly winter-into-springlike, so this is what I came up with:
This linen maxi dress was my Easter dress last year. It's a 1990s Liz Claiborne dress that I bought on Ebay, a size 10 that doesn't quite fit through the bodice, so I always wear something over it. I'd been thinking that this thrifted wool pullover would be pretty with it in colder weather. The gray-blue still strikes me as really lovely against the blushy, almost peachy pink of the dress. I also like the play of the heavier wool with the linen.
Here I am trying to assume a more pleasant expression:
And here's Dora helping me.
Today: ponytail it is. But my hair continues to feel good after yesterday's wash, which is something. It still feels clean, not gummy or weighed down, or too dry. It's just doing what it normally does in cold weather, which is be relatively straight. I keep thinking it's too long, but it is nice to be able to pull it back and put it up.
Anyway, I'm boring myself now. Maybe I'll peck away some more at the little lines I've started to write this morning –– terza rima, in stanzas of one tetrameter line and two dimeter lines (so eight stresses per stanza in all, though not being really a metrist I move the actual feet around a lot). Or I'll reread the Mass readings. Then it'll be time to go.