November Reflections
Nov. 30th, 2022 04:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
denebalgedi777It is now over 1 year since I moved to the St. Croix River valley area and the time elapsed since then seems somewhat of a blur. Judging from this experience, a year is just enough time to settle in. It took months just to get unpacked and to learn the new locale. I had never lived in a rural township prior to last year, and it takes some getting used to for lifelong residents of suburbia who have very easy access to services. I used to live about 5 minutes drive from a retail area with “all mod cons” as the English say. There is a good sized town with all of that only a few miles away, but I am more efficient in my use of those services these days, after a crazy year of inflation in fuel and food. I have also, to date, explored but a small part of my local area, being more reluctant to drive around aimlessly, which was in earlier years a favorite pastime of mine. Something to look forward to for the next year, I suppose.
The Indian Summer lasted into November this year, which was rare. During the tail end of that I was guarding the house of a friend who was out of town for a milestone birthday. That afforded me the opportunity to visit some of my old haunts in the Western Suburbs. I visited Rice Marsh, Staring, and Hyland Lakes. The fall drought was so severe that the lakes have dropped over 20” from their high water levels. They had until recently continued to fall 0.5” each week. I have never seen the area’s lakes so low, and reportedly this is the region’s worst prolonged drought since the late 1980s when I was only a boy. There are long black and gray strands of dirt between the old shoreline and the new. I had always thought it a shame that more of Minnesota’s lakes didn’t have nice beaches, or that one couldn’t easily walk the perimeter of the lake – well, now you can. Still, even in their lowered condition they had a lot of ducks and geese passing through on migrations, and it was nice to see this, because waterfowl are now an exotic sight for me. The Wisconsin driftless has few lakes and wetlands, only rivers, and I don’t live right near a wetland like I used to. It’s not so many miles away, but practically a different world.
During that time the weather was very unusual for November: gray, cloudy, humid, and a temperature in the low 60s. It almost felt like later spring. But one day it was as if a switch got flicked. In the morning, near Hyland Lake where I went for a morning stroll before starting up work for the day, the sun had come out and the bluebirds were massed there by the visitor center singing. It felt in that moment like summertime. But only an hour or so later, a rainstorm blew in and the temperature fell precipitately. By the afternoon it was in the 30s and with a fierce wind. Nevertheless I braved the cold for a walk after work, just around sunset. No one else was out on foot in the cold gray dusk. I scarcely saw a face in cars driving by; only a suburbanite mom in a Porsche SUV who waved as she drove into her driveway. The suburbs, along with many other populated areas I have visited this year, had a strangely depopulated atmosphere. I can’t shake the uneasy feeling that life has never returned to normal after the COVID-19 era, even with the gradual opening up ongoing since the last year and a half or so. There are still crowded times and places, but enough places are obviously desolate that they give the impression there are just fewer people than before.
Ever since that odd week spent abroad, there has been a bipolar effect in the weather. There has been cold weather and the first lasting snows, but also a few days here and there reaching into the 50s. Both deer hunting season (with rifles, that is) – a major event in the Upper Midwest, and especially in Wisconsin, with a vast number of hunters – and Thanksgiving came and went in a flash. I am thankful this year that it was rather more peaceful than in the past two years, when anxiety, hysteria and anger were running amok on the populace. Thanksgiving with some of my sibling’s in-laws was quieter than in some years they have done it, with several people unable to make it, but everyone was in high spirits and it was one of the better Thanksgivings in recent years. This was definitely an improvement over the frayed nerves that sometimes accompanied that time of year in the last decade or so. I have looked on in horror as American politics became more and more damaging to the sanity of all who partake of such a vice for long enough that a year of respite was very welcome indeed.
The first significant snowfall of the season came and went yesterday. I had to make a trip out to the airport before dawn and the conditions were already extremely hazardous, and the snow raged on all day. Now it’s a bright, harsh, cold, windy day like January as I write this. It has been an interesting month as the winter pattern of wildlife begins. All the regulars at the bird feeder are still coming in, along with the juncos who arrived with the cold, as they always do. The meadowlarks and bluebirds finally went south for the winter. I saw sandhill cranes and tundra swans flying south in the past month, sometimes in great numbers. This year a large number of birds nested successfully and some of the new birds, like cardinals and tufted titmice, have been regulars since then. Just a few minutes ago I watched a sharp shinned hawk pursuing an unfortunate chickadee, and I’m not sure if it survived. The area has a thriving ecosystem, there is no doubt about that – the more species the merrier, and it is quite lively here. Large flocks of turkeys have been forming up for the cold months. The only conspicuous absentees are the deer, as hunting is ongoing, but they will return to daylight activity in time.
There’s a sense of quiet as the year 2022 fades away. Next month I will celebrate the first year of my blog’s existence and review the accomplishments of a year marked by some delays, difficulties and obstacles. I expect it will end as it began, with stargazing in the cold nights around the ragged ends of the year. I have watched as Saturn, Jupiter and Mars have all become visible again in the evening sky. It will not be long before Orion is rising to greet nighttime travelers. It’s already Sagittarius season, and the sense of ease and festivity that I always associate with that time is setting in. Soon it will be time to greet the coming year with a sense of optimism, resolve and renewed purpose. The 2020s are looking to be a difficult year for the world in general, yet I intend to make 2023 one of my best years yet.
The Indian Summer lasted into November this year, which was rare. During the tail end of that I was guarding the house of a friend who was out of town for a milestone birthday. That afforded me the opportunity to visit some of my old haunts in the Western Suburbs. I visited Rice Marsh, Staring, and Hyland Lakes. The fall drought was so severe that the lakes have dropped over 20” from their high water levels. They had until recently continued to fall 0.5” each week. I have never seen the area’s lakes so low, and reportedly this is the region’s worst prolonged drought since the late 1980s when I was only a boy. There are long black and gray strands of dirt between the old shoreline and the new. I had always thought it a shame that more of Minnesota’s lakes didn’t have nice beaches, or that one couldn’t easily walk the perimeter of the lake – well, now you can. Still, even in their lowered condition they had a lot of ducks and geese passing through on migrations, and it was nice to see this, because waterfowl are now an exotic sight for me. The Wisconsin driftless has few lakes and wetlands, only rivers, and I don’t live right near a wetland like I used to. It’s not so many miles away, but practically a different world.
During that time the weather was very unusual for November: gray, cloudy, humid, and a temperature in the low 60s. It almost felt like later spring. But one day it was as if a switch got flicked. In the morning, near Hyland Lake where I went for a morning stroll before starting up work for the day, the sun had come out and the bluebirds were massed there by the visitor center singing. It felt in that moment like summertime. But only an hour or so later, a rainstorm blew in and the temperature fell precipitately. By the afternoon it was in the 30s and with a fierce wind. Nevertheless I braved the cold for a walk after work, just around sunset. No one else was out on foot in the cold gray dusk. I scarcely saw a face in cars driving by; only a suburbanite mom in a Porsche SUV who waved as she drove into her driveway. The suburbs, along with many other populated areas I have visited this year, had a strangely depopulated atmosphere. I can’t shake the uneasy feeling that life has never returned to normal after the COVID-19 era, even with the gradual opening up ongoing since the last year and a half or so. There are still crowded times and places, but enough places are obviously desolate that they give the impression there are just fewer people than before.
Ever since that odd week spent abroad, there has been a bipolar effect in the weather. There has been cold weather and the first lasting snows, but also a few days here and there reaching into the 50s. Both deer hunting season (with rifles, that is) – a major event in the Upper Midwest, and especially in Wisconsin, with a vast number of hunters – and Thanksgiving came and went in a flash. I am thankful this year that it was rather more peaceful than in the past two years, when anxiety, hysteria and anger were running amok on the populace. Thanksgiving with some of my sibling’s in-laws was quieter than in some years they have done it, with several people unable to make it, but everyone was in high spirits and it was one of the better Thanksgivings in recent years. This was definitely an improvement over the frayed nerves that sometimes accompanied that time of year in the last decade or so. I have looked on in horror as American politics became more and more damaging to the sanity of all who partake of such a vice for long enough that a year of respite was very welcome indeed.
The first significant snowfall of the season came and went yesterday. I had to make a trip out to the airport before dawn and the conditions were already extremely hazardous, and the snow raged on all day. Now it’s a bright, harsh, cold, windy day like January as I write this. It has been an interesting month as the winter pattern of wildlife begins. All the regulars at the bird feeder are still coming in, along with the juncos who arrived with the cold, as they always do. The meadowlarks and bluebirds finally went south for the winter. I saw sandhill cranes and tundra swans flying south in the past month, sometimes in great numbers. This year a large number of birds nested successfully and some of the new birds, like cardinals and tufted titmice, have been regulars since then. Just a few minutes ago I watched a sharp shinned hawk pursuing an unfortunate chickadee, and I’m not sure if it survived. The area has a thriving ecosystem, there is no doubt about that – the more species the merrier, and it is quite lively here. Large flocks of turkeys have been forming up for the cold months. The only conspicuous absentees are the deer, as hunting is ongoing, but they will return to daylight activity in time.
There’s a sense of quiet as the year 2022 fades away. Next month I will celebrate the first year of my blog’s existence and review the accomplishments of a year marked by some delays, difficulties and obstacles. I expect it will end as it began, with stargazing in the cold nights around the ragged ends of the year. I have watched as Saturn, Jupiter and Mars have all become visible again in the evening sky. It will not be long before Orion is rising to greet nighttime travelers. It’s already Sagittarius season, and the sense of ease and festivity that I always associate with that time is setting in. Soon it will be time to greet the coming year with a sense of optimism, resolve and renewed purpose. The 2020s are looking to be a difficult year for the world in general, yet I intend to make 2023 one of my best years yet.
