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Jeffrey Streeter's avatar

A lovely post, a beautiful guide to what I want to call human half-hibernation. You have caught the mood of the season perfectly.

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Mike Sowden's avatar

This is a wonderful range of suggestions, thank you. :) And it sent my thoughts in so many new directions, as your writing always does...

Your point about how the light seems to find dust and dirt made me think of that first day of bright sunshine in spring where you curse at all the dust and launching into a shame-driven frenzy of triage-cleaning. (Last year, when I was still living in a wooden cabin here in Scotland, that first sunny day in late March was an embarrassing shock, I was disgusted at myself.) Maybe it's something about the oblique light of new spring and late autumn shining through windows at an angle that's rare during those long summer months? Dust-hunting light.

...and that makes me remember being taught about the use of the seasons in surveying and landscape photography when I was an archaeologist - how the low light's great for recording features, but the high summer is when the earth dries out enough to show where hidden features are trapping moisture, but *that* is nothing compared to the terrain shadows that appear after a decent snowfall. A full year of sunlight is a wonderful toolkit for recording a place properly.

Also, I love 9) and I've been talking about something similar with so many people recently, with "Wintering" as the catalyst of those conversations. Just how seasonal could our lives get, in all the ways, including our work? It's a nice antidote to that feeling of our lives being like walking through a city where the lights burn just as exhaustingly 24 hours a day...

I'm rambling. Should have left it at "thank you".

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