Tag: amaryllis

Winter, Light, and Windows

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The weather’s been having a lot of fun with us. Over the last week we’ve been up and down the thermometer from ten degrees to fifty and back, with the coming week predicted to do the same. In the warm spells the snow goes, and when the snow goes we lose a lot of information. In this photo from a few days ago, you see a clear demonstration of why I only grow my tomatoes behind a fence. A few other animals wander through, but that’s mostly the heart-shaped hoofprints of deer.

That evidence is gone now, but the strengthening light has its own games to play. To me this photo shows the lovely effect of the sun’s rays reaching out like fingers of a warm, gentle hand. My grandmother saw it as “the sun drawing water.” I thought that was awfully prosaic, but it’s another possible point of view: where I see something coming down, she saw something going up. It’s so common for different people to look at the same thing and see it differently, it must be an advantage to a community – whatever’s happening in the world, you have options in deciding what to do. 

Whether the sun is pulling them up or their roots are pushing them out, my hellebores are positioning themselves to be ready for the race to spring. They don’t exactly die back in winter but they lie low. Their newly perked-up posture chimes with their nickname, Lenten Roses, and bodes well for flowers well before Easter. 

The increasing light also plays games with my indoor plants. From the dining room window it looks like there’s something red blooming outside on the snow, or at least some persistent fallen leaves. But no. It’s the reflected glory of the poinsettias, the window partly a mirror and partly transparent in this particular afternoon sunshine. 

There’s a little of the same thing going on at my studio window, though you have to look beyond the riot of frills and frolic that is my amaryllis collection to see it. The red phantom of an amaryllis has materialized way out by the road, where a last strip of snow hangs on in the shadows. Is it a ghost of the past winter? A mirage of the coming spring? Now new snow is falling, thin and unconvincing, much of the ground too warm to sustain it. The red ghosts are gone but their fleshly originals are still at my windows, stretching out to lean against the glass, in case the sun calls on them again for a bit of magic.

Song and Rain

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The tulips at my windowsill are done now and the amaryllis have come into glory, turning their backs to me because the sun is so much more compelling. Birds that were here all winter but mostly hiding in the shrubbery, are now flaunting themselves in song – certainly song from the cardinals and robins. I’m not sure I’d call it that from the bluejays. Still, it serves their purpose, claiming a territory, finding a mate, the tasks of approaching spring. 

The snow has turned to rain, sometimes as it falls. The ice is gone from our small neighborhood creek, where bare branches and flattened grass give us a longer view than usual of the path it provides for deer on their way to the river. That’s one of my favorite things about winter – how it changes the way we see things.

There’s a song about changing viewpoints, starting with clouds, that I always think of when I’m on an airplane. I like to sit in the window seat and watch the familiar, detailed ground turn into vast maps, and clouds become veils and carpets. I take photos and make sketches but nothing’s gelled into a painting yet. 

The sky is a rich source of painterly inspiration from below as well as above. Walking up my street yesterday I saw this. How would I paint clouds so they came out like that? Painted ultra-realistically, wouldn’t they look fake? These particular trees are evergreens so the view is seasonless, but if I painted in bare branches, or hung them with snow, or flowers, or red leaves, the same sky would tell a different story every time.

This is one of my favorite early-spring photos, taken a few years ago. I love how the tree seems to grow out of the barn, entirely because of where I stood to take the picture. The trees are bare; the sky looks like it might want to snow but will have to settle for rain. Once the tree leafs out, the barn, from this angle, will disappear. With all the development happening in our area, it may already be gone.