Winter, we hardly know you. Unusual random thought to have but I had it. It came to me as I looked out the back window here at the ranch and saw the wind-driven snow shooting across my already white lawn. Couldn’t see to the neighbor’s place. Not that it mattered. Save for an emergency we wouldn’t see each other this day. Too cold to go calling. That is how we often think of winter: the anti-social season; few visitors, not many strolls through the neighborhood. It’s reputation as a bringer of boredom and bad times is perhaps a bit undeserved. Given the right circumstances, winter can be a most interesting season.
I have gone to walk trails at Lackawanna State Park in winter and found some marvelous things, small things perhaps but engaging all the same.
We were attracted one day of a recent winter to the Manny Gordon Recreation Area at Thornhurst. On the face of it things weren’t great: all clouds, no sun to sparkle the ice but we did have snow and it was cold. Given that there had to be something to look at, something to feel beside a chill. We were not disappointed.
The solitude of the place struck first, not just quiet at face value but a deep quiet that absorbed every outside sound: cars on the road, trucks passing by, planes overhead. Here was isolation from the everyday world of noise we live in. Here, in this area where winter reigned, it was possible to simply stand and hear nothing save for the occasional wind in the pines. It was a place where the hardships of winter might be forgotten, at least for a moment. It was cold but not too cold to enjoy another side of winter.
See you next time.
