Dark Days of November.

11-24-19 SHORT HILLS: I‘ve been back here for a while as the holidays creep up on us. There’s less than a month until the Winter Solstice, after which the sun slowly begins to come back to the north.

The leaves are mostly down, with beech, oaks, Japan and Norway maples, burning bush all holding on to a few. It’s a cold, dreary, dark rainy day, but not as cold as Vermont was two weeks ago. We have had a few mornings when the temps were in the upper twenties, so we have had a frost or two, but no real freeze, and it’s almost December.

I have done yard clean up of fallen branches a few times. Every stormy day brings a new branch fall. I pruned the junipers, removing a lot of dead branches. They grow so thick that a wet snow weighs them down and breaks branches, so I try to thin them out as much as possible.

We saw Parasite last night, it should be a contender for Best Picture. Bong Joon-ho shows us a dystopian, Dickensian society. I’m not at all sure to whom the title refers.


Mourning Dove foraging under the feeders.

Female Cardinal, is she feeding or just using the umbrella.

We think of her as Claudia, and her mate, usually around the feeders, as José.