The first winter at the farm.  It has not been a bad winter, yet, a winter such as it was last year for instance…yet.  But, we are just a week into January, and I have no illusions or predictions about what might well lie ahead.

For the last three years, the farm has always been drenched in color when I’ve been here: soft yellow greens of Spring, then deep and dense Summer green, and the russet and red glory of Fall.  All color bled away as October gave way to November, and every view looked somewhat like a Wyeth landscape: muted, quiet, watchful.

At first, I missed the color.  The landscape seemed somewhat wrong clothed in these browns, greys, and tired yellows. The clear, piercing blue of sunny-day skies was somehow too great a contrast – it almost seemed wrong to have such a blue sky hanging over such color parched fields and hills.

Then, out of necessity I suppose, I began looking closer.  Cornfields took on a kind of grandeur – row upon row of bronze, spooling out over the valley as far as the eyes could see.  And pasture grass, flattened by wind and snow, sprinkled with morning frost, revealed their own feathery beauty.

As in so many things, there is illumination and delight in shifting one’s perspective…

“If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden