Encountering Earth

Snow...  I love the snow! This love was rekindled on Tuesday evening when I took a walk in the park. It was dusk, the snow was falling gently and gathering on the pine trees. The lake had a thin coat of ice and snowflakes made it white. Snow is so amazing. It is hard to imagine that each flake is unique!  I looked up snowflake on wiki and found: A  snowflake  is a single  ice crystal  that has achieved a sufficient size and may have amalgamated with others, then falls through the  Earth's atmosphere  as  snow .  Each flake nucleates around a dust particle in  supersaturated  air masses by attracting  supercooled  cloud water droplets, which  freeze  and accrete in crystal form. Complex shapes  emerge  as the flake moves through differing temperature and humidity zones in the atmosphere, such that individual snowflakes differ in detail from one another... It always fascinates me to look up the ...

I was fortunate to spend time at Thanksgiving with my family in south Jersey. My sister and I took a lovely walk in the woods behind the cemetery where my dad and most of his family are buried. This is the Wharton tract, a preserve of 122,880 acres in the heart of the Jersey Pine Barrens, the largest in the state. When I go online to read about Batsto Village and Wharton State Forest, it leaves me kind of cold. Facts and figures don't give the feel of home and history. The Pine Barrens are my bioregional home. I am a fourth-generation "Piney" - someone born and raised in the pines. The sandy soil, the pitch pines, cat briers, teaberry, jack oak these are my kin. The waters of the Mullica and Batsto Rivers are lifeblood. I still delight in the sweet smell of the cedar water; I relish the irony taste of the artisan well at Batsto. To walk along these rivers with their slow, serpentine meanderings is like walking with a friend. The feel of pine duff and sand beneath my feet...