(Fruit of the hawthorn [Crataegus], these often persist into winter, where they add needed colour to the soggy North Coast landscape. After the leaves fall, the tree's bare branches remain heavily decorated with thousands of these tiny scarlet apples, which, when fresh, are a welcome amendment to jams, jellies, wines, and cider.)
(This is Dacrymyces chrysospermus, the orange jelly mushroom. It grows on deadwood in moist forests – two things we have aplenty here on the North Pacific. It's also a winter harvest, making this fungus doubly useful, since it's eminently edible when sautéed in butter. )
(Trumpeters [Cygnus buccinator]. Brief stopover over two foggy days. Watching this large flock of very big birds light on this small lake in successive wings was a memorable experience.)
(Huge black cloud rolled in on a brilliant sunny day today, and suddenly we were being hammered with bean-sized hail. Not uncommon for late winter/early spring on the North Coast, though the size of the stones was notable. Open photo below in a new window to see the air filled with ice.)
Back in 2014 I shared a little one-man Christmas cheer game I indulge in at this time of year, a simple Google search string that fills your screen with seasonal warmth and goodwill from the past. Now I've found another one that does much the same, except now the pictures move.
Basically, you're going to do the same thing we did then, except on YouTube. You'll load the YouTube home page, enter "Christmas" and a year in the search bar, and hit return. And your results page will fill with home movies.
Case in point: "Christmas 1963", above. Under no circumstances miss the little girl dressed to the yuletide nines, demonstrating the Twist. Nor the fact that this footage was shot a month or less after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Terrifying things had happened, yet folks were celebrating the holidays anyway, with unstinting courage.
This life passes so fast. You turn your head, and the Twist is old and tacky, and it always was.
But that's not true. For a day or two, one Christmas long ago, it was fresh and futuristic and something old people should learn about.
And the same thing is happening right now. It'll happen tomorrow too, and the day after that, and we need to pay attention to it every day.
So we can remember how new and bright it was, and we were, when we look it up on YouTube sixty years hence.
Better still, YouTube being what it is, you'll find all kinds of other jaunts home in the margins. Old TV commercials; "hip gifts for 1963" news segments; period holiday music. And you can change up that search string: "Chanukah", "holidays", "Xmas", "New Year's", "December", "winter", and every year you've lived.
If you're a native of the pre-Internet world – that place of sustained attention and short memory – you know how miraculous all of this is.
So get out there and take advantage of it. God knows this new realm is annoying enough; might as well get something out of it while we're up.
The very best of holidays from all of us here at Rusty Ring.
(Found this garter snake[Thamnophis sirtalis] asleep under a tarp that had been pulled over a stack of gardening supplies sometime last year. He didn't even flinch when I lifted the tarp, put it back, or lifted it again later to get the photo. So the dude's out for the duration.
I'll look for him out and about after things warm up.)
(This is Garrard Creek, a tributary of the Chehalis, about two weeks ago. The parallel lanes of trees normally line the tops of high banks on either side of the creek bed. Yet here they stand mid-stream in what has become a very wide, renegade river. One that closed most of the roads in this rural district for about a week, trapping some folks behind it and preventing others from lending them assistance.
