Detail Diary, Vol #25
The gray hinge of winter
January 2025
Dear friend,
January has given us a whole palette of grays, from leaden to marbled to silvery. In Grenoble, we’ve sailed through an alternating tide of crystalline, smoggy high pressure fronts and warm, moody low pressure systems. Winds bearing hints of spring; thundering downpours of hail and lightning. Mostly just gray, though.
I walked in the arboretum and meditated on mud and the bare eloquence of tree branches, as I do every winter, and watched dry leaves and fallen cones live their quiet hibernations. Other days it was the clouds fretting the sky, shrouding the mountain, catching fire in that brief hinge of evening.
I took three videos of birds busy with their waning-winter work: a charm of goldfinches clearing out the sweetgum pods, a great spotted woodpecker sounding a tree trunk, and one of the eager early blackbirds staking out his territory in song. There were many, many other birds. Especially rooks.
And somehow, I was surprised to see the year’s first flowers already, in the last week of the month: snowdrops, primroses, hellebores; the usual heralds. I can never quite keep up with the spin.
Read on for the details…
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First, the snowy tail end of my holiday at home in Idaho/Utah:
And back to the warmer, though drizzly climes of Grenoble.