Flakey Eye Candy Friday

Yes, i’m thoroughly disenchanted with snow.

But it still can be awfully beautiful sometimes. Even if it is now March.

(Snowflakes on my coat last weekend.)

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Flurries

Flurries on my blog, courtesy of WordPress (I love it when they do this!).

And flurries outside.  (Hmm.  I may not love those so much.  Still, it IS December now, so I need to suck it up, I guess.)

The rain and open water of a few days ago are a memory, courtesy of a 20 degree F drop in temperature.  Winter coats are retrieved from storage, as are all the accoutrements.  (Though the RockStar — teen daughter — and the Gothlet are strenuously resisting frostbite-inducing reality, in the way of adolescents.  What is up with that?  It’s almost universal at their age, though.)

I went outside to photograph a shawl which actually didn’t make it into the Shawl-apalooza blog post (so that should have been SIX shawls and two socks! — silly me).  I had put this aside temporarily for other projects that needed to be finished, and now am happily working on it again, so needed to document progress: for my project page on Ravelry and for you!

This is the Aestlight Shawl designed by Gudrun Johnston, a Shetland-style garter stitch shawl.  I am knitting it from gorgeous Damselfly Yarns‘ Sterling Sheep yarn (a blend of superwash merino, silk, nylon and silver).  The colorway is called ‘Prospero’s Sea’, which is so very apt.   After seeing the yarn sparkle in the summer sun, back in warmer times when I began the shawl (and being a long long way from Prospero’s or any other sea), I dubbed my version of the shawl “Dawn at the Lake”.

And in taking the first two photos above, I found little bits of sparkles, besides those silver sparkles in the shawl; even though the sun is hiding at the moment.

It’s very pretty, fluffy and snowflake-y snow.  Though cold.

The hackberry above and mystery plant below are remembering warmer days of yore, I think.

Maybe it’s just my memory, or maybe it’s that winter is so long here, but it seems to me that all the deaths in my family happen in the winter.

Today, very shortly, I leave for a quick back and forth trip to the Twin Cities for my uncle’s funeral.

Our lives are as ephemeral as snowflakes, aren’t they? in the bigger picture.

Do you remember the Little Prince learning the word ‘ephemeral’?  Right now, that scene makes me pretty misty.  (Not that “The Little Prince” doesn’t do that all by itself.)  A quote from the author of “Le Petit Prince”,  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, therefore seems especially appropriate:

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.