January Sky in Three Pieces

We have snow again and
there may yet be more--that's what this piece of sky--a milky sky--says to me. This is the view from my front door as I set out to crunch through the snow up to the Loch--my favourite local walk. I have put on mini leg warmers, knit so long ago I had forgotten them, to keep the unusually deep (for us at any rate) snow off my cuffs.

Halfway to the loch, with the wind propelling these we-mean-business clouds in my direction, I decide to head back home. My last walk I barely missed a pummeling of hailstones--my least favourite of all the wintry precipitation.

It's 10:30 in the morning and we are a bit more than 30 days past the solstice--the longest night--so we have gained about 30 minutes of sunlight, but still this is the season of the lazy sun. High noon does not have the same meaning up here. The sun is about three fingers high in the sky--about as high as it will get.

 The home stretch for me. The roof top of Ivy Cottage visible beyond the bare branches. The foreshortening makes it look as if we sit directly on the moor--Greenland Moss, but there is a road between us, a kind of demarcation of the frontier of current versus past habitation. In the spring a flowering currant blossoms where people once lived and there are deep ruts where peats were dug. In early spring, the roadway that once crossed the moss is visible.  The snow covered hills on the horizon lie beyond that long stretch of boggy, peaty land but one of the many virtues of hill walking--even in my own back yard--is the marvellous sense of King of the Hill perspective it gives.