In one of Elizabeth Strout’s stories in Olive, Again a character remarks on the quality of February light. “What she would have written about was the light in February.  How it changed the way the world looked.  People complained about February; it was cold and snowy and oftentimes wet and damp, and people were ready for spring.  But for Cindy the light of the month had always been like a secret, and it remained a secret even now.  Because in February the days were really getting longer and you could see, if you really looked.  You could see how at the end of each day the world seemed cracked open and the extra light made its way across the stark trees, and promised.”

The promise of spring is all around if you look carefully, past the grey days and the occasional flurry of snow.  One day you will walk past the same bank of willows and suddenly they seem to glow golden with an inner light and the red osier dogwoods flame a blood scarlet.  The great horned owls who began calling back and forth in the twilight last month are already nesting. And beavers, coyotes and foxes are all mating. As are the hairy and downy woodpeckers and flickers whose drumming fills the morning quiet. Even the hardy little chickadees are practicing their mating calls.

 The ground is scattered with wind blown seeds already softening in the wet snow, just waiting to drop down into the dirt and germinate.  Even beneath the ragged snowcover, in the subnivean layer, voles who torment you in the summer garden are reproducing.  And as more sunlight filters through, plants have begun to grow. Newly hatched stoneflies are crawling over the snow and in their dens mother bears have already given birth. 

The ancient Celts recognized the beginning of spring, on the first of February, the Cross Quarter, half way between the Solstice and the Equinox.  To them it was Imbolc or Brighid.  For me, this light of February is a bittersweet light.  I am reluctant to see the end of winter.  Every new snowfall now is a celebration, a chance to savor for a few more days the quiet, contemplative beauty of a winter’s day.  But these last snowfalls are fleeting, giving way to the slush and blue skies of longer days and warmer weather and all around me are the reminders of the changing seasons

I

I have come to river’s edge to spend a few moments letting go of the day’s busyness, to try to quiet my scattered thoughts and worries. I sit on the wind swept trunk of an uprooted tree. An overnight freeze has sent hundreds of small rafts of ice into the river and I watch as they flow down the current, pass under the bridge and disappear around the snow-crusted sandbar.  Slowly my thoughts drift away with them and I’m not aware of the cold seeping into my clothes as I sit entranced by the flotilla that appears like clouds scuttling through the reflected sky of water. 

But the gathering of ice in an eddy near the shore draws me back.  One by one frozen chunks are pulled out of the main current and swirl together, beginning to spin as they are sucked into the scour hole. As one after another attaches itself to the outer edges they coalesce and I am caught up in the growing crystalline spiral. It feels like magic, the way all the pieces are coming together, as if I am on the verge of a marvelous discovery. 

But then the revolving circle begins to scrape along the rocks in the shallower water. The grinding sound gets louder as the blue water between the ice and the bank gets thinner and thinner until the ice sheet suddenly catches up on the shore and begins to shudder.  The spinning slows, then stops as the ice distends and distorts, frozen in place and all that is left is a frigid spit. The free floating rafts of ice slip past to continue their journey downriver and I try to loose myself and drift downstream again with them, but now I am distracted by the cold and the spell is broken.

The great horned owls have begun their seasonal call and response—from cottonwoods to ponderosas, their haunting echoes through the backwoods just as the daylight is fading and darkness falls.  The owls have been a constant throughout the last few years—their nesting sites down towards the river.  I have watched as they roosted in the branches near the house.  I awoke one morning to see two piercing yellow eyes staring at me from the tree outside my bedroom window.  I have scavenged the ground for their pellets and pulled them apart to find skulls and pelvic bones and reconstructed the skeletons of whatever they had feasted on the last few days.  

I even found a dead great horned that had been hit by a car.  I took it to the natural history museum at the university and helped the curator prepare it as a teaching specimen.  I parted the chest feathers to reveal the patch of soft bare skin where it nestled down on its eggs to warm them, I opened its stomach to reveal the partially digested dove it had consumed just before dying.  And inside the dove, the seeds of its last meal.

I watched as an owl dove into the berry garden after a small bird that had wriggled its way into the sweet fruit through a gap in the fence.  The owl glided in on silent wings, talons extended, but hit the netting over the garden, tumbled and rolled across the top and finally came to rest on a cross beam, feathers all askew and a confused look on its usually wise face.  The little bird quietly hunkered under the blueberry bush, probably wondering at its brush with death.

I found one of my chickens decapitated in the yard—the victim of a great horned owl who is known to crave the brains of its prey.  Many  Native American cultures consider the owl an omen of death and I was uneasy when they became such an ever-present part of my life.  And this year their calls do seem to echo with death.  So many deaths of good friends and relations these last few years—my mother, my mother-in-law and my brother-in-law, a couple of Ted’s childhood friends.  This fall our neighbor, a surrogate grandfather to my sons who never knew their grandfathers who passed many decades ago.  And then, on New Year’s, the sudden death of our friend and the drummer in Ted’s band, Micki Singer, killed in a head-on accident on his way home from a gig. In spite of suffering for years from health problems, he was always eager to share his passion for music and never passed up an opportunity to play.

With no parents still alive and on social security, death seems so much closer than it ever has before.  Our future no longer stretches in front of us, full of endless possibility.  And yet, I don’t feel like the owls that are haunting me presage death.  For I have also seen a pair of owls courting each other, watched as the male fluffed his white chest feathers, cocked his tail and bobbed and nodded, uttering “come hither” calls.  I watched as the female spread her wings and bowed, snapping her bill.  And then the male flew to her and they clacked beaks.  Their calls were quick and urgent, he mounted her and it was over in just seconds.

Later that summer I found their nests and watched day after day as the awkward balls of fluff feathered out and finally fledged, learning to hunt on their own.  Great horned owls are among the earliest species of birds to nest and their courting calls begin just as the solstice brings its promise of lengthening daylight and renewal.  To hear them calling now reminds me that life and death are intertwined. But I learned from Micki that every day is a chance to do what you love and to not waste a moment of the life we have left.

The last two weeks in Missoula have been unrelentingly cold with inversions trapping the valleys under a veil of dismal grey.  For many people this has been trying–particularly since we are all breathlessly waiting for snow and the beginning of ski season.  But the photographer in me has been rejoicing because the fact that the daytime temperatures never rise above the mid-20s means that the pond and riverbank have been an ever-changing landscape of ice.  The fascinating forms captured by the freezing water are artworks far surpassing what my own imagination could ever conjure up.  

In a workshop at the Photographer’s Formulary with Dan Burkholder, I learned how to use precious metal leafing techniques with prints made on translucent velum.  This creates a modern take on the famous orotones done by Edward S. Curtis in the 19th century west.  

This technique is wonderfully suited to my series of icescapes. A selection of these silver leafed prints are in the current show at the Dana Gallery in Missoula, MT.