January Patterns

I find it difficult, in the first days of January, to wipe away the holiday lights and trimmings. Out on the split rail fence at the end of the driveway, we wound a string of clear lights that twine around the rails and provide bright punctuation to the dark nights in the depth of winter.

Photographing those light through a screened window turned each light into a four pointed star. Wondrous stars, they wandered into my camera and out into this pattern of dancing stars.

On Monday, January 5, the day of the full moon, the moon set in the morning (as full moons do) of a day that dawned very cold and windy. The kitchen thermometer said it was three degrees above zero outside and the wind was sweeping across White Rock Shoal. Floes that had formed the day before broke with the wind and became icy chunks that formed patterns as the waves pushed and pulled at the shoreline.

Here at Cedar Bluff we have been dragging our feet about taking down the Fraser fir upon which we hung a multitude of red balls and beads and vintage ornaments for Christmas. The beads and the balls and the tiny figures are all tucked away for next December, but morning and night, the lights burn brightly on the big fir.

I happened to spot a freighter, the Mesabi Miner, one the thousand footers that ply the Great Lakes, as it passed by at sunrise on Friday, January 9th. The morning was cold. Twelve above zero and there was a cloud line way out on the eastern horizon of Lake Huron.

My camera caught the reflected lights on the fir tree and the lights on the great ship and the soft tones of a winter sun rising across the great lake. Majestic moments like these form the patterns of January along the Lake Huron shore in Michigan.