denebalgedi777

The first pink strands of rosy-fingered dawn were evident when I conceived to write this piece. It is only a few days since a large blizzard, the largest in years, turned the entire landscape white, a condition that I rather suspect will persist until spring. This was the scene that I woke up to, which seemed all too fitting for a time to reflect on an old project. Last year, I began a series of observations of the natural world which ran weekly. The idea was to chart the course of the seasons in my small corner of Creation, here in the Upper Midwest of the United States. Fate intervened however, which I will describe in a moment, and so it is that I now begin the project again after an absence.

The project took the form of chronicles. For some years I had lived on the Marsh, and the idea came to me to describe the nature on the marsh, and also the nature that I observed on my many wanderings around the area. I was a native of the Western Suburbs of the Twin Cities (for that is what the metro area of Minneapolis-St. Paul is called by natives, or just “the Cities”), and as anyone who is familiar with the area will know, there are many parks and reserves for the adventurous soul to explore. Given the extra free time that came with the pandemic era, I took the occasion to visit them, and then to write about what I took away, as well as my regular observations of the Marsh as well. So far so good, no?

The project came abruptly to a halt last January, that is early this year. The last entry I believe concerned a trip to the ancestral homeland of my mother's family, well to the north of the twin cities. We arrived on New Year's Day and I ended up staying a week. In the process, I saw some wondrous sights, including the most extensive ice fog events in my lifetime, turning the whole north woods into a crystal forest, and some of the most spectacular sundowns I've ever seen. Sigurd F. Olson, who wrote many reflections on life in the north woods, often described sundowns like this and it was only on this occasion that I noticed goings down of the sun that matched his descriptions. No doubt I was filled with optimism, hoping that it would inspire me to further chronicles of the natural world.

As a matter of fact, after this time, I was distracted from the project and it lapsed for quite some time. The year became a flurry of activity, some of it planned but most of it a surprise. After the trip, I went back to work and the rest of January passed rather uneventfully. February saw the coming of a deep chill, but by the end of the month, it was already evident that an early spring would dawn soon. March was an active month, with plenty of outdoor adventures beginning almost from the start of the month, and no doubt, there would have been ample material for the chronicles except that I found out near the end of the month that I would be moving to a new location. This created a definite stir, and in practical terms it meant the effective disruption of my projects for some time to come. To make matters worse, I took a cross-country road trip in April, only a short time after finding out I would move. That trip could be the subject of a book on its own.

In May, I began the long-winded process of getting the property ready to sell. I will spare the details except to say that it involved a lot of boxing and putting things into storage, cleaning things up and so on. This persisted into June. The meteorological summer had only just begun, and buyers were found almost immediately. The sale was completed, and I straight away took a week off and went back up north to the same location previously described. It came as kind of a shock, as at the beginning of the year, I had no idea or intention of moving. And to be quite honest, I had hit a bit of a rut, and was experiencing a feeling of dejection. 2020 was a difficult year for many people and it was no exception for me. For things to change so suddenly, it put my head to spinning.

Luckily, The buyers gave quite a generous term to get out of the place, so it was not until August that I had to leave for good. This was a blessing, because if you live in the same place for some years, things can get quite cluttered, and most of July was used up in making preparations. Furthermore, additional complications came into the picture. The location that I was moving to required construction, so it happened that I would have to live up north in my mother's ancestral homeland whilst the renovations were made. In a twist of fate, I ended up living in a third location temporarily. This involved quite a balancing act of moving, transporting goods, and moving again. I also had to negotiate working from home, and for a time I also had to use public Wi-Fi due to a very serious hiccup in internet service in the rural area I had moved to. It was a novel situation for me.

Not only did I move once, I moved twice this year. I ended up, completely unplanned, living in the country for an entire season -- that is, from August until November. This was in the Northwoods of Minnesota. Then in November, I finally moved to the ultimate destination, western Wisconsin, not far from the grandeur of the St Croix River. The whole thing was rather dreamlike and nostalgic. Both were places that I had spent time in my boyhood, yet never dreamed that I would live in, and certainly not so suddenly after a long and seemingly complacent period in the Western Suburbs of Minneapolis. And both afforded very different views of the natural world. It ought to go without saying at this point, that these experiences will be the jumping off point for a series of entries. The chaotic events of 2021 will go down in my personal annals as a time when the sheer momentum of events shook me out of a trance.

Hopefully, it will now be evident why a rundown of the events of this year were necessary to explain the lapse in the project, but also its rebirth. I have now in the course of a single year, lived in three very different biomes, and I've seen the changing seasons in three locales that were very dear to me since the time I was young. That provides a unique opportunity to describe the natural world from a number of perspectives that would not have been available to me in any previous year of my life. I should also note in concluding, that the previous series of entries will be published in time, to give additional context to the reader. This is intended to be the inception of a longer range project, one that I hope will prove inexhaustible, given the short life of man and the immensity of the topic at hand. A good part of science is simply industry, taking the time to record one's observations for posterity so that the subject or his successors may profit thereby.