Today is one of those glorious pea-soup foggy days. I told Asher that some cloud up in the sky was curious about people, and came down to visit. “Look, mama, I can’t see the school!”

I have 35 minutes to myself to get my heart pounding and revel in the quiet. Normally I would hear many birds singing and squirrels barking whenever I passed too closely to their trees. Not today. In the hush of the low-lying mist, even the birds seem to whisper, as though they’re in church.

Perhaps the hundreds of squirrels are all still abed, sleeping in. Perhaps today is a day of rest, even though it’s not marked as such on my calendar. Spiderwebs on hedges are so wet with dew, they are sagging.

I pass a neighbor’s yard. Tiny droplets of water sparkle at the end of pine needle sprays. The closest trees are black against the fog, distant ones are erased in mist. The trees are laid bare, arthritic bones are revealed. And yet, they look lacy against the gray-white sky, as though they’ve put on crocheted gloves over their bony fingertips. Some still sport seed pods or random leaves that forgot to fall. Some are already swelling with buds, as if to proclaim to King Winter, “I am not finished! You will not conquer me.”

No dogs bark at me, even at the home where five of them jealously guard their little patch of Fair Oaks. Their fence sign boasts, “I can make it to the gate in 3 minutes. Can you?” I assume they’re all vying for space near the heating vents and fireside indoors.

I walk down a long straight hill, noticing the deep green of a redwood, the rosy blush of a heavenly bamboo bush. Tiny signs of the coming spring are revealed a bit here, a bit there. I have to look closely for them, and they make me smile. There’s a flowering quince! It’s coral buds are getting fat. Some early blooms are opening nearest the base of the twigs, and they’ll bloom upward like that in a kind of wave. I spy rosemary bushes covered in lavender blossoms. But they’re lonely. No bees serenade them yet. One front yard is graced with a thick ruffle of petite, buttery jonquils.

I notice the squish of my feet as I pass some yards, where the messy autumn leaves are being left to rot. Leaf litter is ground into black muck on the pavement. Some leaves are disintegrating into doilies.

A small flock of Canada geese flies low, making two passes and honking. They are clownish phantoms except when directly overhead. Their monochrome blends into the sky.

I trudge up the hill and come close enough that the garish green fence finally reveals itself. It blinks out of the fog as if someone just turned on the electricity. It is the greenest fence I have ever seen. It is, frankly, impossibly green, and moreover, frankly, I adore it. If it had only stayed plain, showing its natural wood tones, it could have graced a traditional Japanese garden. Happily, its goofy coloring is nowhere near so demure. Happily, it shouts hello to me into the quiet morning.

I round the corner, passing the empty playground. Sometimes little ones with parents are here playing. Not today. Even the beehive in the base of the tree is quiet, seemingly deserted. I hope the bees are inside keeping warm.

There’s something rather Victorian about my neighborhood today. Somehow the fog lends these familiar sights a romance, a mystery. I imagine cobblestones and hoop skirts, and the watery glow of London streetlamps. Where is that piper when I need him?

Houses are storytellers, if you bother to notice the tales they share. Some are old-old, falling mournfully into disrepair or melting into their overgrown yards. Some tell you they are rentals; they seem to say they aren’t one-family homes, but rather they entertain a series of lonely guests year after year. Some homes are elderly men and women, who quite clearly and purposefully look after their health. They take their vitamins and their fiber. They are kept up, wearing nice clothes and dapper roofs. Their neatly trimmed trees and bushes tell you they see the manicurist regularly. Few homes around here are new; they glow with youth like the fresh-faced teens of the neighborhood. Some proudly sport both laugh lines and boob jobs at the same time. These have shiny SUVs in their driveways.

It’s all kind of magical. It’s all ordinary. And since I alone am here to witness it, it’s all mine.

The boys and I checked out a local nature area that I only recently became aware of. Schweitzer Grove Nature Area in Fair Oaks is a lovely grove of eucalyptus. At this time of winter, the grasses and mosses are all bright green and the afternoon sunshine makes everything magical.

The key feature is this tiny creek running through the park. It was jumped and crossed endlessly while we were there. I’m told that the springtime singing of the frogs is delightful.

Eucalyptus Sky

Funny golden mushrooms of some type (I am no mycologist)

With a pair of trusty hand-me-down boots, a kid can go almost anywhere.

Balancing on this plank bridge was no problem for Lucas. Asher would accept no help; he crawled across.

Having opportunities to meaner by oneself is so important. Honestly, kids don’t get to do this much these days—even my kids. I followed behind, trying to give my boys their space.

With those trusty boots on, it was inevitable that he ended up in the creek.

An undeveloped park like this, of this size, really is a perfect place to wander, discover, and ramble about. The drawback to this place, since I am not a frisbee golfer, is that this is also a frisbee golf course—apparently one of the oldest ones around. Besides ourselves, there were many young male golfers present, mostly of college or high school age. Nearly every one of them carried a very large can of beer—possibly a function of it being Friday near 5 p.m. They were mostly polite and friendly, but I did worry a bit about one of us getting beamed by a frisbee while we were walking. I think next time we come here, we might aim for a weekday morning instead.

Inspired by SouleMama {this moment} – A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.

We don’t have any real snow. Today’s high is expected to be 61 degrees F. We enjoy these warmish winters in California, our afternoons without a jacket. We also long for some honest-to-goodness, stay-home-from-school snowman-making days. Alas, we have to pretend.

I deliberately left some snowflake Christmas ornaments out this year, even though the rest of Christmas is all packed away. They help remind me that the season is beautiful, even amid the mud. Perhaps Mr. Bentley, the snowflake king, inspired me a bit.

I pulled out last year’s paper snowflakes. Lucas was into them last year and helped me make some. He’s got other things on his mind this year, though, (like creating creatures and writing about them).

Asher, on the other hand, thought I was a miracle worker when I cut new snowflakes the other evening and let him carefully unfold them. He was amazed and it was such a joy to see his rosy-cheeked face light up when the snowflake was revealed! Yesterday, after school, we taped the paper flakes up on our windows. Asher helped and thought it looked “AWESOME”!

“Mama, we could make a whole lotta snowflakes!”

“Yes, we can, baby!”

Paper snowflakes look nice silhouetted against an evening sky. (I sometimes cut snowflakes using paper doilies. They make for very lacy edges.

See? You can still have fun with skills learned in primary school: After the kiddos went to bed last night, I busted out some instructions for making five-pointed snowflakes I found on How About Orange. Jessica’s folding instructions are superb and while Ian and I watched Henry Rollins doing stand-up, I cut about five of these star-shaped snowflakes in various sizes.

Here are my five-pointed snowflakes at dawn. Asher was pleased to help stick them to the windows. I think they’re beautiful, if I do say so myself. I don’t know if my dear Mr. Bentley would approve, since this shape of ice crystal is not found in nature, but I think they’re lovely nonetheless. I expect to bust these out again next Christmas, perhaps with some gold foil paper. My thanks to Jessica Jones for the pattern.

Finally, I’m really enjoying this snowflake mobile that our friend Dakini gave us this year. It’s sweet, intricate, and lovely hanging in our kitchen—but mighty hard to photograph!

We are excited about getting baby chicks next month and are making arrangements to be there when the shipments arrive at our local feed store. There are a couple of Thursdays in February when the store is supposed to have eight breeds arriving. Newly hatched chicks are shipped right away—for the first three days after hatching they don’t need food or water, so they can be safely shipped and will arrive alive! (This is just amazing to me.)

Once we have them, we’ll have to keep our chicks in our garage for the first eight weeks or so, in a cozy, clean box with a heat source. We are hoping to get all different varieties so that we can know them as individuals and be able to tell them all apart. It will be so fun to hold fluffy chicks and feed them by hand! This is sure to make them very friendly.

The five hens we have are doing great, though their egg production has slowed because of the shorter days of winter. We had a ton of rain in December and it turned our happy hens into sodden, bedraggled hens and our chicken run into a muddy mess. The girls seem to be doing fine regardless of the rainstorms, yet these drier days of January are a relief, I think.

Fireball is quite adventuresome. She led the others right up to our backdoor and peered inside at us, as if to say, “Hey, lady! Let us in!”

Midnight, in the back there, is molting, so she’s looking scruffier than usual, especially on her breast. In November, Snowdrift molted and it was somewhat distressing for us newby chicken farmers to see her looking so scraggly and pathetic, with all those pretty pure-white feathers scattered about. Snowdrift’s new feathers have since grown in and she’s now especially lovely (but shy).

I was surprised that Sunrise was willing to get so close to me. Usually she’s pretty skittish. She gives us green eggs, which is pretty cool if you ask me.

We’re hoping to get Australorp, Plymouth Rock, Buff Orpington, Wyandotte, Sussex, and Welsummer (a hen that lays dark brown eggs) chicks. All of these except the Welsummer are considered to be excellent layers with a high yield and friendly, calm birds. Now isn’t this a whole new kind of geeky?

I am not usually one to wax on about science. Don’t get me wrong. I love science and I think it’s perfectly marvelous. People who do science (wait, that’s everyone!) are amazing and clever and inspiring. But usually, I don’t consider myself a science geek …

Except sometimes, when science and beauty intersect. There! Right there is where my interest is captured fully and profoundly.

Enter my latest scientific fascination: W.A. (Wilson Alwyn) Bentley. Mr. Bentley was 17 years old in 1885 when he first paired his love of snowflakes with this newfangled gizmo called the photographic camera. He created on his Vermont family farm the very first photo-micrograph of a snow crystal and thus launched his career. In 1931, the year he died, he published Snow Crystals, in which he published 2,500 of his some 5,000 photographs of snow crystals.

I checked out Bentley’s book (Dover, 1962) from my local library.

And it is AWESOME.

That’s it. Page after page after page of white snow crystals on a black background. Perfect and fragile and exquisite. Fascinating and mind-blowing. Two hundred and one such pages, depicting unique crystals, including snowflakes, ice flowers, windowpane frost, rime, glaze, and graupel. There are only eight pages of text in this miracle of a book.

My dear Mr. Bentley, I think I love you.

I haven’t been taking as many photos lately. Being indoors because of cold, crummy weather puts a damper on my photography. I’m rarely satisfied with the shots I take indoors. Yet, here are a few highlights of January so far.

Birdseed is a great attractor. This fellow visited the seed I placed on my outdoor table so I could watch the birds through my window. The local squirrels are the wiseguys of the neighborhood; they literally shake down the birdseed and steal from the intended recipients.

Lucas and I enjoy walking together in the late afternoons to get Asher from preschool. On this day, Lucas revealed his intention to write a series of “Scary Tales,” frightening adaptations of fairy tales “not suitable for anyone under 8.”

No snow, just bare branches around here. We get lots of days dominated by grays and greens. There’s something magical about blue winter skies, I think.

My mother knitted this handsome sweater for Asher in the color he requested. He loved it and wore it several times. This morning he rejected it, however. He said it was “too fuzzy.” I think he and I have a very different understanding of what fuzzy is. For him, “fuzzy” might just mean, “I don’t like any sweater that you choose for me, Mama.”

Some new books I’m dabbling in, by which I mean I’m less than a quarter of the way through all of them. Two are beautiful gifts I received and one will hopefully help me better understand my son’s 9-year change.

A new year! Can you believe it? I admit to feeling a little insular lately, an unusual state (for me) of being somewhat introverted. I can sense a lot of questions circulating inside of me and so I’ve not had many words to share. I feel there is some fertile ground ready and waiting, and I’m not sure what seeds to sow there. I’ve been walking in circles restlessly, and yet trying to take advantage of small moments of quiet to hear … I don’t know what. Hopefully something important and moving.

I guess this is all OK. It is the quiet, dark time of the year, the time of hibernation and lying fallow in the cold. Resting is not my strength, frankly. I am in between creative projects. I have impulses to jump in several directions at once, which has me kind of teetering. Whatever. I’m just trying to give myself some time to figure things out. Who knows, maybe I’ll be given the gift of some understanding or revelation on the Epiphany, just a couple of days from now. Wouldn’t that be nice?

And so, since I don’t have much to say, I’ll take a moment to brag about some of the Christmas projects we did last month.

Poplar cutting boards for friends and family. We made a cat, two owls, a tropical fish, an apple, and a leaf. I love them.

I learned to use the scroll saw and cut out these pine wood trees for some friends. I hope they might find a place on their winter nature table. I used the same acrylic wash to paint them, and used a beeswax polish to seal and shine them up. I’m looking forward to making some of these for our home, too.

Ian made some marvelous wood stilts for Lucas for Christmas. They are hard to use at first, but Lucas has already practiced with them enough to have gotten the hang of it.

And now that the rush and business of Christmas is done, it’s time to start thinking about Asher’s upcoming birthday.

I’d just like to pop in and say Happy New Year! It’s been a lovely winter break around here these last several days, even though I’ve been working quite a bit this week—more than in most years, actually. I’m glad to have the work, and yet still yearn for the downtime, especially while everyone is at home.

There has been lovely block play,

some reading of How to Train Your Dragon, and quite a bit of cozy “Avatar: The Last Airbender” viewing.

Ian tackled some home renovation projects, including fixing a gate and finishing the Hearth Project (which was started and abandoned half finished more than eight years ago). Here is the beautiful result:

Lucas has practiced on his new skateboard from uncle Jon.

And Asher has worn his new chaps and vest (a precious family heirloom of our friends, loaned to us while they fit) in a most creative way.

So, that’s pretty normal right, for the last days of a year: continuing on, finishing, fixing, solving, resting, mulling, embracing new challenges, learning new skills, reinventing old stuff to be new again?

Relax. Review. Renovate. Remember. Reinvent.

Well, it’s normal around here.

Wishing you all the best in the New Year!

It’s been so sweet, this little Christmas bubble. I want to hibernate here for a good long while. My sons and my husband are at home all this week, too, so we have lots of good family time ahead.

Our Christmas was wonderful. We’re always very busy right up to the end of Christmas Day, visiting with family. But we have carved out a few very happy hours at home on Christmas morning and they are most precious!

May he always rejoice at the sight of a new book! Santa brought Dragonology for Lucas.

Asher was most impressed with the gold-wrapped chocolate coins. Santa brought him a dragon book, Tell Me a Dragon, and a stuffed seal backpack.

Lucas’s other Santa gift was Fuzzoodles (as seen on TV!) : They’re like chenille pipe cleaners with really long fuzz. They come with Mr. Potato Head-style eyes, mouths, noses, feet, etc., and can be used again and again to make silly creatures. So far I’m pretty happy with these, especially since both of my boys are able and happy to play with them.

More scenes from Christmas morning (my, it seemed dark!): A handwork basket for Lucas, complete with crochet hook and assorted yarns including some handspun ones (from Syrendell). New books like How to Train Your Dragon, the Eight Year Old Legend Book, and number 1 in the Nathaniel Fludd Beastologist series. (I sure hope he ends up liking sci-fi and fantasy as much as we do.) Playing with the gnomes we made.

Ian and I lovingly crafted a number of wooden toys and a pretend-play costume. Here is Asher’s new wooden dragon, designed and crafted by me and Ian. Painting this was so much fun! I used a watered-down wash of acrylic paint and sealed it with a beeswax polish. It smells wonderful, as do the rainbow wooden gnomes we made.

Here is a “remote control” airplane that Ian made for Asher. There’s a handle on the end of the stick that acts like a joystick, tilting the wings as it flies. Ian made stilts for Lucas, too!

We also visited with family on both sides Christmas Day and everyone seems to be doing great! Even RoRo was dressed up and looking happy when we saw her at my parents’ house. I couldn’t begin to enumerate all the amazing gifts we received and I’m feeling extremely grateful and also overwhelmed by it all. Certainly presents do not make the holiday, but I admit I am awestruck at the generosity we are paid. We appreciate this so much. I don’t know where we are going to put it all!

We were proud to give a number of homemade gifts this year, including poplar cutting boards, nature table decorations, herbal glycerin soaps, photo books, and one wacky googly-eye jar. Plus a small assortment of books. Honestly, it wouldn’t be Christmas without books.

Our home filled up Christmas night with our beautiful, talented, magical, loving friends. Thank you, my darlings, for filling our home with warmth, love, and laughter. Thank you for spending your Christmas with us. You inspire and fortify us.

And then … the long day ended in the wee wee hours.

In the morning, our time to relax came. A CitiBlocks tall ship, indoor hovercraft-spaceship-thingy, coffee and reading a biography of Cleopatra, trying out Lucas’s homemade stilts, attempting to skateboard for the first time, looking at pictures, a Da Vinci picture book, wearing the wool sweater my mother knitted for me, a bite of Belgian chocolate, roasted root vegetables, popcorn and The Princess Bride, pajamas all day, crystal growing kit, and snickerdoodles = Best. Boxing. Day. Ever.