spring to winter

Greetings again from our snowy Springtime wonderland.

The pictures I have to share today encompass the drive home from our successful trip to the eye doctor and our wanderings thereafter. Because I had so little charge to my battery I delayed taking pictures til we reached the heights of Mount Uniak on our northwest trip home to the Annapolis Valley.

The skies were wild again and the light low

so my pictures are somewhat blurry, but the majesty was worth recording.

Here we see one of many wind turbines

Ridiculously gigantic, I always want to call these "windmills" with their

surrealistic milling of the wind

I'm afraid my pictures don't do justice to the awesome grandeur of these cloudscapes

As we came down from the mountain, the trees changed and the farmfields began

This view is to the northeast

Looking like snow, these are outcroppings of gypsum out of which less and less "gyproc" (drywall) is made as synthetic gypsum is actually cheaper to make.

I am pleased with my Canadian version of a Gainsborough painting.

Now we are passing through Windsor and one of my favourite buildings, this abandoned textile mill, Nova Scotia Textile Limited, which is for sale many years after someone tried to renovate it.  Wally and I spend a minute fantasizing about living there and opening a gallery. I tell him (again) about my trip to the artist David Hockney's textile mill in Saltaire where he realized a similar dream

We come, eventually, to the flood plains of the Avon River with a view to Blomidon at the end of the North Mountain.

The Avon and Blomidon both "spill" into the Bay of Fundy.

We see more and more tidy farm fields, but as we near home the rain that has been spitting all along, turns into sleet and then to snow and by the time we leave the grocery store near home it is seriously snowing very wet fat blobs of snow. I'd run out of battery by then.

But here's what it looked like by bedtime.

I think I'm the only one left, besides the polar bears, who loves it.

The next morning, this morning,  the ash tree still adorned with a few Christmas ornaments

The other ash tree poses like a ballerina in her frothy tutu

The hedge is deliciously sugared

And the back yard and beyond look like February again

Beyond the hayfield to the ethereal forest's edge

Babu keeps me company

always on the lookout for something moving, the snow narrowing his pupils to slits

was that a bird?

I was surprised to find a Coptic stitched sketchbook at the dollar store ( 4 bucks) and knew I wanted to use it for fountain pen drawings, this one embellished with gold paint pen.

The cheap paper buckled with the wet paint and bled along the ink lines but I don't mind.

I hope our visit finds you well and taking pleasure in The Gift.