Mid Winter Quotes

The great miraculous bell of translucent ice is suspended in mid-air. It rings to announce endings and beginnings. And it rings because there is fresh promise and wonder in the skies. Its clear tones resound in the placid silence of the winter day, and echo long into the silver-blue serenity of night. The bell can only be seen at the turning of the year, when the days wind down into nothing, and get ready to march out again. When you hear the bell, you feel a tug at your heart. It is your immortal inspiration.

The thought of interrupting someone mid-conversation gave me hives. It was awkward and rude and I would rather throw myself into an ice pool in the dead of winter.

In the bleak mid-winter Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak mid-winter Long ago.

Much has been said of the aesthetic values of chanoyu- the love of the subdued and austere- most commonly characterized by the term, wabi. Wabi originally suggested an atmosphere of desolation, both in the sense of solitariness and in the sense of the poverty of things. In the long history of various Japanese arts, the sense of wabi gradually came to take on a positive meaning to be recognized for its profound religious sense. ...the related term, sabi,... It was mid-winter, and the water's surface was covered with the withered leaves of the of the lotuses. Suddenly I realized that the flowers had not simply dried up, but that they embodied, in their decomposition, the fullness of life that would emerge again in their natural beauty.

...we could see the parapet of Ryougoku Bridge, arching above the waves that flickered in the faint mid-autumn twilight and against the sky, as though an immense black Chinese ink stroke had been brushed across it. The silhouettes of the traffic, horses and carriages soon faded into the vaporous mist, and now all that could be seen were the dots of reddish light from the passengers' lanterns, rapidly passing to and fro in the darkness like small winter cherries.

Astrology is for those bored by astronomy, but fascinated with themselves.

From sunset she appeared, Her cloak pierced by a bloom Of unfamiliar climes. She summoned me somewhere Into the northern gloom And aimless winter ice. And bonfire burned 'mid night, And with its tongues the blaze Did lick the very skies. The eyes flashed fiery light, And falling as black snakes The tresses were released. And then the snakes encircled My mind and lofty spirit Lay spread upon the cross. And in the snowdust's swirl To black eyes I am true, To beauty of the coils. (untitled: "From sunset she appeared")

Some enterprising rabbit had dug its way under the stakes of my garden again. One voracious rabbit could eat a cabbage down to the roots, and from the looks of things, he'd brought friends. I sighed and squatted to repair the damage, packing rocks and earth back into the hole. The loss of Ian was a constant ache; at such moments as this, I missed his horrible dog as well. I had brought a large collection of cuttings and seeds from River Run, most of which had survived the journey. It was mid-June, still time--barely--to put in a fresh crop of carrots. The small patch of potato vines was all right, so were the peanut bushes; rabbits wouldn't touch those, and didn't care for the aromatic herbs either, except the fennel, which they gobbled like licorice. I wanted cabbages, though, to preserve a sauerkraut; come winter, we would want food with some taste to it, as well as some vitamin C. I had enough seed left, and could raise a couple of decent crops before the weather turned cold, if I could keep the bloody rabbits off. I drummed my fingers on the handle of my basket, thinking. The Indians scattered clippings of their hair around the edges of the fields, but that was more protection against deer than rabbits. Jamie was the best repellent, I decided. Nayawenne had told me that the scent of carnivore urine would keep rabbits away--and a man who ate meat was nearly as good as a mountain lion, to say nothing of being more biddable. Yes, that would do; he'd shot a deer only two days ago; it was still hanging. I should brew a fresh bucket of spruce beer to go with the roast venison, though . . . (Page 844)

The rapid nightfall of mid-December had quite beset the little village as they approached it on soft feet over a first thin fall of powdery snow. Little was visible but squares of a dusky orange-red on either side of the street, where the firelight or lamplight of each cottage overflowed through the casements into the dark world without. Most of the low latticed windows were innocent of blinds, and to the lookers-in from outside, the inmates, gathered round the tea-table, absorbed in handiwork, or talking with laughter and gesture, had each that happy grace which is the last thing the skilled actor shall capture--the natural grace which goes with perfect unconsciousness of observation. Moving at will from one theatre to another, the two spectators, so far from home themselves, had something of wistfulness in their eyes as they watched a cat being stroked, a sleepy child picked up and huddled off to bed, or a tired man stretch and knock out his pipe on the end of a smouldering log.

Robin Hood. To a Friend. No! those days are gone away, And their hours are old and gray, And their minutes buried all Under the down-trodden pall Ofthe leaves of many years: Many times have winter's shears, Frozen North, and chilling East, Sounded tempests to the feast Of the forest's whispering fleeces, Since men knew nor rent nor leases. No, the bugle sounds no more, And the twanging bow no more; Silent is the ivory shrill Past the heath and up the hill; There is no mid-forest laugh, Where lone Echo gives the half To some wight, amaz'd to hear Jesting, deep in forest drear. On the fairest time of June You may go, with sun or moon, Or the seven stars to light you, Or the polar ray to right you; But you never may behold Little John, or Robin bold; Never one, of all the clan, Thrumming on an empty can Some old hunting ditty, while He doth his green way beguile To fair hostess Merriment, Down beside the pasture Trent; For he left the merry tale, Messenger for spicy ale. Gone, the merry morris din; Gone, the song of Gamelyn; Gone, the tough-belted outlaw Idling in the "grene shawe"; All are gone away and past! And if Robin should be cast Sudden from his turfed grave, And if Marian should have Once again her forest days, She would weep, and he would craze: He would swear, for all his oaks, Fall'n beneath the dockyard strokes, Have rotted on the briny seas; She would weep that her wild bees Sang not to her---strange! that honey Can't be got without hard money! So it is; yet let us sing Honour to the old bow-string! Honour to the bugle-horn! Honour to the woods unshorn! Honour to the Lincoln green! Honour to the archer keen! Honour to tight little John, And the horse he rode upon! Honour to bold Robin Hood, Sleeping in the underwood! Honour to maid Marian, And to all the Sherwood clan! Though their days have hurried by Let us two a burden try.

and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.

When you walk along a wooded path In the nature my heart held so dear, Remember the joy that it gave me And know that I’ll always be near. When a robin announces his presence Singing solo as day becomes new The doe lifts her head to listen As her fawn drinks the freshness of dew. When an otter glides through the river, His swim is a masterful one. He engages his mate in a playful chase Then they climb on the rocks to sun. When the rustling leaves touch the autumn sky, Boasting colors of russet and gold Geese wing on their southern-most journey To escape from the beckoning cold. When the North wind blows through the towering pines It delivers a mid winter’s chill While snowflakes drift softly on fresh frozen lakes And the call of the wild becomes still. In each of these things, remember me. And know that I’ll always be near. The woodlands, God’s wondrous Creation, In His nature my heart held so dear.

Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.

an hour at which (as it was now mid-winter) the dirty fingers of Night would have drawn her sable curtain over the universe, had not the moon forbid her, who now, with a face as broad and as red as those of some jolly mortals, who, like her, turn night into day, began to rise from her bed, where she had slumbered away the day, in order to sit up all night.

Let me wander here forever, through the glades where once I played, Long ago in carefree seasons, mid the noontide sun and shade. I will see again before me, all those smiling friends I knew, gone alas to memory's keeping, faithful comrades good and true. Oh, those days of youth and splendour, when we dreamed of glorious war, vows were made to keep forever, and return back here once more. Then the clouds began to gather, winter came, we marched away, singing songs of love and valour, off we went into the fray. Comes a warrior returning, to autumn's gold-clad trees, where the leaves do fall like teardrops, on the gently sighing breeze. Casting sword and shield aside now, I stand weary and forlorn, In the silence of the woodlands, I will rest until the dawn. Let me sleep and dream forever, of the golden days of yore, and those friends who marched off with me, who'll return alas no more.

When I was a boy in the Barony of Gilead, there were seven Fair-Days each year—Winter, Wide Earth, Sowing, Mid-Summer, Full Earth, Reaping, and Year’s End.

From above you could see the chaos of entangled plots on the other side of the road, and a couple of tough tethered goats, and the glint of a frozen pond somewhere in the trees. Above them the sun was shining vaguely through the milky November sky, old but strong. In April – between the thaw and the jungly green explosion of summer – or in raw mid-October, I bet the same view would have been barren and depressing. But when we stood there all the bits of old tractors and discarded refrigerators, the shoals of empty vodka bottles and dead animals that tend to litter the Russian countryside were invisible, smothered by the annual oblivion of the snow. The snow let you forget the scars and blemishes, like temporary amnesia for a bad conscience.

See, boys?” Moundshroud’s face flickered with the fire. “The days of the Long Cold are done. Because of this one brave, new-thinking man, summer lives in the winter cave.” “But?” said Tom. “What’s that got to do with Halloween?” “Do? Why, blast my bones, everything. When you and your friends die every day, there’s no time to think of Death, is there? Only time to run. But when you stop running at long last—” He touched the walls. The apemen froze in mid-flight. “—now you have time to think of where you came from, where you’re going. And fire lights the way, boys. Fire and lightning. Morning stars to gaze at. Fire in your own cave to protect you. Only by night fires was the caveman, beastman, able at last to turn his thoughts on a spit and baste them with wonder. The sun died in the sky. Winter came on like a great white beast shaking its fur, burying him. Would spring ever come back to the world? Would the sun be reborn next year or stay murdered? Egyptians asked it. Cavemen asked it a million years before. Will the sun rise tomorrow morning?” “And that’s how Halloween began?” “With such long thoughts at night, boys. And always at the center of it, fire. The sun. The sun dying down the cold sky forever. How that must have scared early man, eh? That was the Big Death. If the sun went away forever, then what?

While we were together, you know, there was nothing to be feared...The only time that I ever really suffered in body or mid, the only time that I ever fancied myself unwell, or had any ideas of danger, was the winter that I passed by myself at Deal, when the Admiral (Captain Croft then) was in the North Seas. I lived in perpetual fright at that time, and had all manner of imaginary complaints from not knowing what to do with myself, or when I should hear from him next; but as long as we could be together, nothing ever ailed me, and I never met with the smallest inconvenience.

By mid-November, his protests notwithstanding, whiskers began sprouting from his face. A few weeks later, his assistant private secretary, John Hay, approvingly punned: Election news Abe’s hirsute fancy warrant— Apparent hair becomes heir apparent.44

But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you. It stays on through October and, in rare years, on into November. Day after day the skies are a clear, hard blue, and the clouds that float across them, always west to east, are calm white ships with gray keels. The wind begins to blow by the day, and it is never still. It hurries you along as you walk the roads, crunching the leaves that have fallen in mad and variegated drifts. The wind makes you ache in some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die – migrate or die. Even in your house, behind square walls, the wind beats against the wood and the glass and sends its fleshless pucker against the eaves and sooner or later you have to put down what you were doing and go out and see. And you can stand on your stoop or in your dooryard at mid-afternoon and watch the cloud shadows rush across Griffen’s pasture and up Schoolyard Hill, light and dark, light and dark, like the shutters of the gods being opened and closed. You can see the goldenrod, that most tenacious and pernicious and beauteous of all New England flora, bowing away from the wind like a great and silent congregation. And if there are no cars or planes, and if no one’s Uncle John is out in the wood lot west of town banging away at a quail or pheasant; if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites.

When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ’gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe! Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

Where is Simus?” Keir asked. As if at his command, the flaps of the main entrance opened, and there was a commotion as Simus was borne aloft on a cot by four men, like the roast pig at the mid-winter festival. I had to smile, and saw that others in the crowd were not immune to the humor of the image. “Make way!” Simus boomed out, his voice filled with laughter. “Make way!” He grinned like a fool, white teeth gleaming in his dark face, carried aloft over everyone’s head, propped up with brightly colored pillows. But his joy changed to a yell of panic when one of his bearers stumbled slightly. This caused an outbreak of laughter in the crowd, as Simus berated his bearers for their clumsiness.

I saw her a few days before —’ He stopped mid-sentence and looked out of the window. He hadn’t returned in time to hear what his mother had wanted to tell him. Halina sensed that the conversation was over and wondered what lay beneath the pained look on his face. The death of a mother always left children with regrets but she had imagined it would be different for a priest.

Clive convinced himself that it wouldn’t be long before we’d be able to predict all their [the moths] equations of cause and effect, then perhaps even map out each and every cell, and configure them in their entirety as robots, in terms of molecules, chemicals and electrical signals. And what fed this particular obsession was Pupal Soup. If you cut through a cocoon in mid-winter, a thick creamy liquid will spill out and nothing more. What goes into that cocoon in autumn is a caterpillar and what comes out in spring is entirely different—a moth, complete with papery wings, hair like legs and antennae. Yet this same creature spends winter as a gray-green liquid, a primordial soup. The miraculous meltdown of an animal into a case of fluid chemicals and its exquisite re-generation into a different animal, like a stupendous jigsaw, was a feat that, far from putting off, fed Clive’s obsession. He believed it made his lifetime ambition easier because, however complex it might be, it was, after all, only a jigsaw, and to Clive, that meant it was possible. For all the chemicals required to make a moth were right there in front of his eyes, in the pupal soup.

Earlier that morning, Escoffier ad brought up a large bucket of white rose petals, white violets and vanilla orchids that he'd been thinking of creating a dish with. The pâtissier had crystalized some of the flowers, and left him a plate of meringue shells, a handful of vanilla beans and fresh cream. He wanted to create a new dish for Sarah, a sweet, something surprising, something to engage her. She'd been playing Joan of Arc, the virgin saint, a seventeen-year-old girl. It was a role she made famous, difficult at any age, but for a woman in her mid-forties, it was nearly impossible. Escoffier tossed a handful of white rose petals into Rosa's bathwater. The white skin. The white roses. 'The essence of Saint Joan is in shades of white, like shades of innocence.' 'Spun sugar,' he thought. 'Vanilla cream, of course.

Green birdflower Meaning: My heart flees Crotalaria cunninghamii | Mid to western states Widespread on sandy soils in mulga communities and on sand dunes, this shrub bears soft hairs on thick and pithy branches. The flower resembles a bird attached by its beak to the central stalk of the flower head; yellow-green, streaked with fine purple lines. Blooms in winter and spring. Pollinated by large bees, and birds.

Galen picking you up for school?" "No, I'm driving myself." Vinegar turns to acid. Sure, it's irritating to take a lukewarm shower when you intended to scald the flesh from your body. But not being able to see Galen today is more disappointing than not having hot water all winter. And I hate it. Spending all of yesterday with him slaughtered my intention of keeping him at a distance. Even if he weren't worthy of his own billboard underwear ad, he's just too likeable. Except for his habit of almost-kissing me. But his obsession with trying to order me around is too cute. Especially the way his mouth gets all pouty when I don't listen. "You two fighting already?" She's fishing, but for what I don't know. Shrugging seems safe until I can figure out what she wants to hear. "Do you fight often?" Shrugging again, I ladle enough oatmeal into my mouth to make talking impossible for at least a minute, which is more than enough time for her to drop it. It doesn't work. After the exaggerated minute, I reach for my glass of milk. "You know, if he ever hit you-" The glass in mid-tilt, I swallow before the milk can escape through my nose. "Mom, he would never hit me!" "I didn't say he would." "Good, because he wouldn't. Ever. What's with you? Do you have to interrogate me about Galen every time you see me?" This time she shrugs. "Seems like the right thing to do. When you have children, you'll understand." "I'm not stupid. If Galen acts up, I'll either dump him or kill him. You have my word." Mom laughs and butters my muffin. "I guess I can't ask for more than that." Accepting the muffin-and the truce-I say, "Nope. Anything more would be unreasonable." "Just remember, I'm watching you like a hawk. Except for right now, because I'm going to bed.

This guy was high on Greg’s suspect list. He was German, though he had left in the mid-1930s and gone to London. He was an anti-Nazi but not a Communist: his politics were Social Democrat. He was married to an American girl, an artist. Talking to him over lunch, Greg found no reason for suspicion: he seemed to love living in America and to be interested in little but his work. But with foreigners you could never be quite sure where their ultimate loyalty lay.

Taking the ring from her, Sebastian slid it onto his own hand. His hands were so much larger that the circlet would only fit the tip of his smallest finger. Grasping her chin in an intractable hold, he glared into her eyes. “I’ll take your bet,” he said grimly. “I’m going to win it. And in three months, I’m going to put this back on your finger, and take you to bed, and do things to you that are outlawed in the civilized world.” Evie’s resolve did not shield her from the heart-thumping alarm that any rational woman would feel upon hearing such an ominous statement. Nor did it prevent her knees from turning to jelly as he jerked her against his body and fitted his mouth to hers. Her hands, suspended in mid-air, went to his head in a trembling butterfly descent. The texture of his hair, the locks so cool and thick on the surface, so warm and damp at the roots, was too alluring to resist. She slid her fingers into the gleaming golden layers and pulled him even closer, helplessly reveling in the urgent pressure of his mouth. Their tongues mated, slid, stroked, and with each slippery-sweet caress inside the joined cavern of their mouths, she felt a hot coiling deep in her belly… no, deeper than that… in the tightening, liquefying core where she had once taken his invading flesh. It shocked her to realize how much she wanted him there again. She whimpered as he pulled away from her, while frustration washed over them both. “You didn’t say that I couldn’t kiss you,” Sebastian said, his eyes bright with devil-fire. “I’m going to kiss you as long and as often as I like, and you’re not to utter a word of protest. That’s the concession you’ll give in return for my celibacy. Damn you.” Giving her no time either to agree or to object, he released her and strode to the door. “And now, if you’ll excuse me… I’m going to go kill Joss Bullard.

When Hamilton, debilitated from illness, rejoined his comrades at Valley Forge in January 1778, he must have shuddered at the mud and log huts and the slovenly state of the men who shivered around the campfires. There was a dearth of gunpowder, tents, uniforms, and blankets. Hideous sights abounded: snow stained with blood from bare, bruised feet; the carcasses of hundreds of decomposing horses; troops gaunt from smallpox, typhus, and scurvy. Washington’s staff was not exempt from the misery and had to bolt down cornmeal mush for breakfast. “For some days past there has been little less than a famine in the camp,” Washington said in mid-February. Before winter’s end, some 2,500 men, almost a quarter of the army, perished from disease, famine, or the cold. 1 To endure such suffering required stoicism reminiscent of the ancient Romans, so Washington had his favorite play, Addison’s Cato, the story of a self-sacrificing Roman statesman, staged at Valley Forge to buck up his weary men. That

Who calls the Prince of the Mud?' … The snapping turtle snapped. Its head shot out to maximum extension—Eliot wouldn’t have believed anything that big could move that fast. It was like a Mack truck coming straight at them. As it bit it turned its head on one side, to take them both in one movement. Eliot reacted fast. His reaction was to crouch down and cover his face with his arms. From the relative safety of this position he felt the day grow colder around them, and he heard a crackle, which at first he took for the pier splintering in the turtle’s jaws. But the end didn’t come. 'You DARE?' Janet said. Her voice was loud now—it made the boards vibrate sympathetically under his feet. He looked up at her. She’d gone airborne, floating two feet above the pier, and her clothes were rimmed with frost. She radiated cold; mist sheeted off her skin as it would off dry ice. Her arms were spread wide, and she had an axe in each hand. They were those twin staves she wore on her back, each one now topped with an axe-head of clear ice. The turtle was trapped in mid-lunge. She’d stopped it cold; the swamp was frozen solid around it. Janet had called down winter, and the water of the Northern Marsh was solid ice as far as he could see, cracked and buckled up in waves. The turtle was stuck fast in it. It struggled, its head banging back and forth impotently. 'Jesus,' Eliot said. He stood up out of his defensive crouch. 'Nice one.' 'You DARE?' Janet said again, all imperious power. 'Marvel that you live, Prince of Shit!

A LITTLE while, a little while, The weary task is put away, And I can sing and I can smile, Alike, while I have holiday. Where wilt thou go, my harassed heart-- What thought, what scene invites thee now What spot, or near or far apart, Has rest for thee, my weary brow? There is a spot, 'mid barren hills, Where winter howls, and driving rain; But, if the dreary tempest chills, There is a light that warms again. The house is old, the trees are bare, Moonless above bends twilight's dome; But what on earth is half so dear-- So longed for--as the hearth of home? The mute bird sitting on the stone, The dank moss dripping from the wall, The thorn-trees gaunt, the walks o'ergrown, I love them--how I love them all! Still, as I mused, the naked room, The alien firelight died away; And from the midst of cheerless gloom, I passed to bright, unclouded day. A little and a lone green lane That opened on a common wide; A distant, dreamy, dim blue chain Of mountains circling every side. A heaven so clear, an earth so calm, So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air; And, deepening still the dream-like charm, Wild moor-sheep feeding everywhere. THAT was the scene, I knew it well; I knew the turfy pathway's sweep, That, winding o'er each billowy swell, Marked out the tracks of wandering sheep. Could I have lingered but an hour, It well had paid a week of toil; But Truth has banished Fancy's power: Restraint and heavy task recoil. Even as I stood with raptured eye, Absorbed in bliss so deep and dear, My hour of rest had fleeted by, And back came labour, bondage, care.

One question that especially intrigues me is exactly when humpbacks started coming to Hawaii and why. In artwork and oral histories of ancient Hawaiians there is no record of humpback whales being there, and there is no evidence that humpbacks were there in large numbers in the mid-1800's during the heyday of whaling. The whalers who provisioned in Hawaii in the winter couldn't have overlooked the numbers of whales that are in Hawaii now. We really don't know what happened, but everything points to a recent colonization of humpbacks. (p.162).

When the crops were thriving, Squanto took the men to the open forests where the turkey dwelled. He pointed out the nuts, seeds, and insects that the iridescent birds fed upon. He showed them the leaf nests of the squirrels and the hideouts of the skunks and raccoons. Walking silently along bear trails, he took them to the blueberry patches. He told them that deer moved about at sundown and sunrise. He took them inland to valleys where the deer congregated in winter and were easy to harvest. He walked the Pilgrims freely over the land. To Squanto, as to all Native Americans, the land did not belong to the people, people belonged to the land. He took the children into the meadows to pick wild strawberries. He showed them how to dig up the sweet roots of the wild Jerusalem artichoke. In mid-summer he led them to cranberry bogs and gooseberry patches. Together they gathered chestnuts, hickory nuts, walnuts, and hazelnuts in September. He paddled the boys into the harbor in his dugout canoe to set lobster pots made of reeds and sinew. While they waited to lift their pots, he taught them the creatures of the tidal pools.

Ode to the West Wind I O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill: Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear! II Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion, Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread On the blue surface of thine aëry surge, Like the bright hair uplifted from the head Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge Of the horizon to the zenith’s height, The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear! III Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lull’d by the coil of his crystàlline streams, Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave’s intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean, know Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear! IV If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed Scarce seem’d a vision; I would ne’er have striven As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. V Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Entering the office, Evie found Sebastian and Cam on opposite sides of the desk. They both mulled over account ledgers, scratching out some entries with freshly inked pens, and making notations beside the long columns. Both men looked up as she crossed the threshold. Evie met Sebastian’s gaze only briefly; she found it hard to maintain her composure around him after the intimacy of the previous night. He paused in mid-sentence as he stared at her, seeming to forget what he had been saying to Cam. It seemed that neither of them was yet comfortable with feelings that were still too new and powerful. Murmuring good morning to them both, she bid them to remain seated, and she went to stand beside Sebastian’s chair. “Have you breakfasted yet, my lord?” she asked. Sebastian shook his head, a smile glinting in his eyes. “Not yet.” “I’ll go to the kitchen and see what is to be had.” “Stay a moment,” he urged. “We’re almost finished.” As the two men discussed a few last points of business, which pertained to a potential investment in a proposed shopping bazaar to be constructed on St. James Street, Sebastian picked up Evie’s hand, which was resting on the desk. Absently he drew the backs of her fingers against the edge of his jaw and his ear while contemplating the written proposal on the desk before him. Although Sebastian was not aware of what the casual familiarity of the gesture revealed, Evie felt her color rise as she met Cam’s gaze over her husband’s downbent head. The boy sent her a glance of mock reproof, like that of a nursemaid who had caught two children playing a kissing game, and he grinned as her blush heightened further. Oblivious to the byplay, Sebastian handed the proposal to Cam, who sobered instantly. “I don’t like the looks of this,” Sebastian commented. “It’s doubtful there will be enough business in the area to sustain an entire bazaar, especially at those rents. I suspect within a year it will turn into a white elephant.” “White elephant?” Evie asked. A new voice came from the doorway, belonging to Lord Westcliff. “A white elephant is a rare animal,” the earl replied, smiling, “that is not only expensive but difficult to maintain. Historically, when an ancient king wished to ruin someone he would gift him with a white elephant.” Stepping into the office, Westcliff bowed over Evie’s hand and spoke to Sebastian. “Your assessment of the proposed bazaar is correct, in my opinion. I was approached with the same investment opportunity not long ago, and I rejected it on the same grounds.” “No doubt we’ll both be proven wrong,” Sebastian said wryly. “One should never try to predict anything regarding women and their shopping.

I had seen the soldiers' god, the Word, the Light, the Good Shepherd, the mediator between the one God and man. I had seen Mithras, who had come out of Asia a thousand years ago. He had been born in a cave at mid-winter, while shepherds watched and a star shone; he was born of earth and light, and sprang from the rock with a torch in his left hand and a knife in his right. He killed the bull to bring life and fertility to the earth with its shed blood, and then, after his last meal of bread and wine, he was called up to heaven. He was the god of strength and gentleness, of courage and self-restraint. The soldiers' god. [fifth-century Brittany] The Crystal Cave, p. 131 of 384

Her bed faced three large uncurtained windows that looked due eat, and she loved the endless variety of sunrises that greeted her from day to day. Growing up in Florida and in the suburbs, she had never realized how the sun paced back and forth through the year, like a restless dog on a tether. During the winter it rose far to the southeast and skulked along the ridgeline, disappearing in mid-afternoon. But now it rising a little past due east, on its way to the northeast where it would achieve the summer solstice, then begin the slow day-by-day journey back to the winter solstice. Watching the sunrise, with its reminder of the endless and inevitable cycles of life, was, she thought, her version of religion.

The hill was covered on its northern side by an ancient and decaying plantation of beeches, whose upper verge formed a line over the crest, fringing its arched curve against the sky, like a mane. To-night these trees sheltered the southern slope from the keenest blasts, which smote the wood and floundered through it with a sound as of grumbling, or gushed over its crowning boughs in a weakened moan. The dry leaves in the ditch simmered and boiled in the same breezes, a tongue of air occasionally ferreting out a few, and sending them spinning across the grass. A group or two of the latest in date amongst the dead multitude had remained till this very mid-winter time on the twigs which bore them and in falling rattled against the trunks with smart taps.

Even if we don't have a special person in our lives we still all love a lot. We love feelings, tastes, sights and sounds. We love the villages, countryside, sprawling cities and towns, We love a sunrise and a sunset, a full moon, a starry night, a cloudy day, the wind on our face and through our hair, we love the rain. From the hot sun on our back on a mid summers day to the first crisp frost of winter. We love a book, or a movie, a song or symphony. Thoseuunafraid of love will be rewarded and see romance in all manner of places. Love is truly all around, not merely the exclusive feeling between lovers and families, or even between friends. We love a lot and we should always be able to love freely and without fear. To love with all our hearts ability.

Tokens Green mwold on zummer bars do show That they’ve a-dripp’d in winter wet; The hoof-worn ring o’ groun’ below The tree, do tell o’ storms or het; The trees in rank along a ledge Do show where woonce did bloom a hedge; An’ where the vurrow-marks do stripe The down, the wheat woonce rustled ripe. Each mark ov things a-gone vrom view— To eyezight’s woone, to soulzight two. The grass ageän the mwoldrèn door ’S a tóken sad o’ vo’k a-gone, An’ where the house, bwoth wall an’ vloor, ’S a-lost, the well mid linger on. What tokens, then, could Meäry gi’e That she’d a-liv’d, an’ liv’d vor me, But things a-done vor thought an’ view? Good things that nwone ageän can do, An’ every work her love ha’ wrought To eyezight’s woone, but two to thought.

Voltaire’s History of Charles XII, which Napoleon read while in Moscow, described the Russian winter as so cold that birds froze in mid-air, falling from the skies as if shot.54 The Emperor also read the three-volume Military History of Charles XII by the king’s chamberlain, Gustavus Adlerfeld, published in 1741, which concludes with the disaster of Poltava.55 Adlerfeld attributed the King of Sweden’s defeat to stubborn Russian resistance and the ‘very piercing’ cold of the winter. ‘In one of these marches two thousand men fell down dead with the cold,’ reads a passage in the third volume, and in another Swedish troopers ‘were reduced to warm themselves with the skins of beasts as well they could; they often wanted even bread; they were obliged to sink almost all their cannon in morasses and rivers, for want of horses to draw them.

The central striking force of the Grande Armée had shrunk to less than half its original size in the eighty-two days between crossing the Niemen and entering Moscow. According to the figures Napoleon was given at the time, he had lost 92,390 men by the end of the battle of Borodino.27 Yet he did not act like a man whose options were limited. During the two days he spent at the beautiful Petrovsky Palace he considered almost immediately retreating to the Lower Dvina in a circular movement, while sending out Eugène’s corps to make it appear as if he were marching on to St Petersburg.28 He told Fain that he believed he could be between Riga and Smolensk by mid-October. Yet although he started looking at maps and drawing up orders, only Eugène supported the idea. Other senior officers reacted with ‘repugnance’, arguing that the army needed rest, and to go north would ‘look for the winter, as if it wasn’t coming soon enough!

The winter drove them mad. It drove every man mad who had ever lived through it; there was only ever the question of degree. The sun disappeared, and you could not leave the tunnels, and everything and everyone you loved was ten thousand miles away. At best, a man suffered from strange lapses in judgment and perception, finding himself at the mirror about to comb his hair with a mechanical pencil, stepping into his undershirt, boiling up a pot of concentrated orange juice for tea. Most men felt a sudden blaze of recovery in their hearts at the first glimpse of a pale hem of sunlight on the horizon in mid-September. But there were stories, apocryphal, perhaps, but far from dubious, of men in past expeditions who sank so deeply into the drift of their own melancholy that they were lost forever. And few among the wives and families of the men who returned from a winter on the Ice would have said what they got back was identical to what they had sent down there.

By mid-August they had read through A Sand County Almanac, and although she couldn’t read every word, she got most of it. Aldo Leopold taught her that floodplains are living extensions of the rivers, which will claim them back any time they choose. Anyone living on a floodplain is just waiting in the river’s wings. She learned where the geese go in winter, and the meaning of their music. His soft words, sounding almost like poetry, taught her that soil is packed with life and one of the most precious riches on Earth; that draining wetlands dries the land for miles beyond, killing plants and animals along with the water. Some of the seeds lie dormant in the desiccated earth for decades, waiting, and when the water finally comes home again, they burst through the soil, unfolding their faces. Wonders and real-life knowledge she would’ve never learned in school. Truths everyone should know, yet somehow, even though they lay exposed all around, seemed to lie in secret like the seeds.

FOR THE REST of the summer Kya and Tate did the reading lessons at the tumbledown cabin. By mid-August they had read through A Sand County Almanac, and although she couldn’t read every word, she got most of it. Aldo Leopold taught her that floodplains are living extensions of the rivers, which will claim them back any time they choose. Anyone living on a floodplain is just waiting in the river’s wings. She learned where the geese go in winter, and the meaning of their music. His soft words, sounding almost like poetry, taught her that soil is packed with life and one of the most precious riches on Earth; that draining wetlands dries the land for miles beyond, killing plants and animals along with the water. Some of the seeds lie dormant in the desiccated earth for decades, waiting, and when the water finally comes home again, they burst through the soil, unfolding their faces. Wonders and real-life knowledge she would’ve never learned in school. Truths everyone should know, yet somehow, even though they lay exposed all around, seemed to lie in secret like the seeds.

For many years, a family of ospreys lived in a large nest near my summer home in Maine. Each season, I carefully observed their rituals and habits. In mid-April, the parents would arrive, having spent the winter in South America, and lay eggs. In early June, the eggs hatched. The babies slowly grew, as the father brought fish back to the nest, and in early to mid August were large enough to make their first flight. My wife and I recorded all of these comings and goings with cameras and in a notebook. We wrote down the number of chicks each year, usually one or two but sometimes three. We noted when the chicks first began flapping their wings, usually a couple of weeks before flying from the nest. We memorized the different chirps the parents made for danger, for hunger, for the arrival of food. After several years of cataloguing such data, we felt that we knew these ospreys. We could predict the sounds the birds would make in different situations, their flight patterns, their behavior when a storm was brewing. Reading our “osprey journals” on a winter’s night, we felt a sense of pride and satisfaction. We had carefully studied and documented a small part of the universe. Then, one August afternoon, the two baby ospreys of that season took flight for the first time as I stood on the circular deck of my house watching the nest. All summer long, they had watched me on that deck as I watched them. To them, it must have looked like I was in my nest just as they were in theirs. On this particular afternoon, their maiden flight, they did a loop of my house and then headed straight at me with tremendous speed. My immediate impulse was to run for cover, since they could have ripped me apart with their powerful talons. But something held me to my ground. When they were within twenty feet of me, they suddenly veered upward and away. But before that dazzling and frightening vertical climb, for about half a second we made eye contact. Words cannot convey what was exchanged between us in that instant. It was a look of connectedness, of mutual respect, of recognition that we shared the same land. After they were gone, I found that I was shaking, and in tears. To this day, I do not understand what happened in that half second. But it was one of the most profound moments of my life.

As for imagery, actions, moods, and themes, I find myself unable to separate them usefully. In a profoundly conceived, craftily written novel such as The Lord of the Rings, all these elements work together indissolubly, simultaneously. When I tried to analyse them out I just unraveled the tapestry and was left with a lot of threads, but no picture. So I settled for bunching them all together. I noted every repetition of any image, action, mood, or theme without trying to identify it as anything other than a repetition. I was working from my impression that a dark event in the story was likely to be followed by a brighter one (or vice versa); that when the characters had exerted terrible effort, they then got to have a rest; that each action brought a reaction, never predictable in nature, because Tolkien’s imagination is inexhaustible, but more or less predictable in kind, like day following night, and winter after fall. This “trochaic” alternation of stress and relief is of course a basic device of narrative, from folktales to War and Peace; but Tolkien’s reliance on it is striking. It is one of the things that make his narrative technique unusual for the mid–twentieth century. Unrelieved psychological or emotional stress or tension, and a narrative pace racing without a break from start to climax, characterise much of the fiction of the time. To readers with such expectations, Tolkien’s plodding stress/relief pattern seemed and seems simplistic, primitive. To others it may seem a remarkably simple, subtle technique of keeping the reader going on a long and ceaselessly rewarding journey.

Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn. When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe! Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God- so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

Unable to take one more second, Andi Williams spun around and hit the power button on the stereo. Bing Crosby’s Winter Wonderland cut off mid-wonder and blissful silence filled the space.  Her best friend and business partner, Eva, appeared from

Unable to take one more second, Andi Williams spun around and hit the power button on the stereo. Bing Crosby’s Winter Wonderland cut off mid-wonder and blissful silence filled the space.  Her best

Unable to take one more second, Andi Williams spun around and hit the power button on the stereo. Bing Crosby’s Winter Wonderland cut off mid-wonder and blissful silence filled the space.  Her

Unable to take one more second, Andi Williams spun around and hit the power button on the stereo. Bing Crosby’s Winter Wonderland cut off mid-wonder and blissful silence filled the space.  Her best friend

I’m not going to be able to go with you this afternoon,” I said. “Oh.” She didn’t seem crushed, but I could tell she wasn’t overjoyed, either. “Well, I guess I can find enough stuff myself.” “Okay,” I said. “Will you be at the meeting?” Kristy asked. “Yeah.” “See you.” “ ’Bye.” It was mid-winter, but it felt chillier inside than out. *  *  *

His nostrils flared. “Charles was right; your arousal is a unique scent. Like a spicy, warm drink on a mid-winter’s night. It rises above other smells, entrancing the mind.

The lion landed in the snow well below the outcrop, at least thirty feet below where he’d been lying on the tree branch. The same as jumping from the roof of a three-story building. I saw him just as he hit, disappearing in an explosion of soft snow. Before I could picture how broken he would be, he erupted from the snow in another leap that covered twenty feet, straight down the side of the hill we’d toiled up. His body began to ball up in mid-air and he crashed down into the snow again, only to reappear a moment later, stretched out and bounding. In a few seconds he was into the bottom of the draw and out of sight.

For You, Friend" For you, friend, this Valentine’s Day, I intend to stand for as long as I can on a kitchen stool and hold back the hands of the clock, so that wherever you are, you may walk even more lightly in your loveliness; so that the weak, mid-February sun (whose chill I will feel from the face of the clock) cannot in any way lessen the lights in your hair, and the wind (whose subtle insistence I will feel in the minute hand) cannot tighten the corners of your smile. People drearily walking the winter streets will long remember this day: how they glanced up to see you there in a storefront window, glorious, strolling along on the outside of time.

I was saying that Saturn was surely in a position of power in the heavens at the moment of your birth … your dark hair … your mean stature … tragic losses so young in life … I think I am right in saying, my dear, that you were born in mid-winter?’ ‘No,’ said Harry, ‘I was born in July.

Paradise This bridge of moon on bended knee above us keening twilight and the snake that is your tongue has taught itself to sing, to sing. My hand so heavy with your hand, your eyes brimmed curve to crease with grief, and you chant Bread will be the body of a king, someday. With a voice like every nectarine, so lovely and so bruised, how I am tempted to you, famished as a rite of spring mid-winter underneath the tricky snow, broom-cold, tripping fig over foot, husky and nervous as the glassy oxen, staggering. Remember, I am but a rib. I curve into your spine and wrap about your heart, fleshless as marrow, your vitreous darling.

How do we know who to vote against?” asked Mathro. “Everyone has their own methods. The candidates spend months making up lies about one another. That’s a dangerous game, though. Some people prefer to vote against the obvious liar, while others enjoy the spectacle so much they vote against whomever’s stories are the least salacious. Some people vote against the candidate who presents the most harmful policies, and of course that itself is a point of contention, while others vote against the candidate who keeps bringing up boring talk of policy rather than a proper mudslinging. Rather than governing, seated representatives spend most of their time creating traps for their political adversaries in order to swing votes against them in the next election. It’s a system born of deceit and propaganda, and ultimately you have to admit that the information you’ve received is so unreliable that you may as well flip a coin.” Diani raised her hand, and Wicksap nodded to her. “My father says he voted against Hefstus two years ago because Elder Rodity said that Hefstus once dug a canal through a graveyard just so he could attach a waterwheel to his house to turn a fan by his bed.” “Which was demonstrably false!” said Wicksap with a smile. “Hefstus invited people for tours of his home to disprove the story, but Rodity repeated it loudly enough and with such conviction that he handily won the election. People voted against the man accused of desecrating a graveyard to afford himself a minor comfort, not the man who spread lies.” Diani’s hand shot up again. “But now they’re saying that Rodity filled the canal with rocks and that’s why Hefstus died of stale air over the winter.” “That’s exactly the method, my girl. Hefstus is both alive and running against Rodity this fall, and now he has to prove to the people that he’s not an impostor, a zombie, or any of a dozen undead creatures that Rodity could accuse him of being. That’s an odipublic in action!

That's the thing about Ohio - winter drags on so long that once mid-March hits, if it's above forty degrees everyone's outside wearing shorts and t-shirts and dining on patios.

Harley Diekerhoff looked up from peeling potatoes to glance out the kitchen window. It was still snowing... even harder than it had been this morning. So much white, it dazzled. Hands still, breath catching, she watched the thick, white flakes blow past the ranch house at a dizzying pace, enthralled by the flurry of the lacy snowflakes. So beautiful. Magical A mysterious silent ballet in all white, the snow swirling, twirling just like it did in her favorite scene from the Nutcracker—the one with the Snow Queen and her breathtaking corps in their white tutus with their precision and speed—and then that dazzling snow at the end, the delicate flakes powdering the stage. Harley’s chest ached. She gripped the peeler more tightly, and focused on her breathing. She didn’t want to remember. She wasn’t going to remember. Wasn’t going to go there, not now, not today. Not when she had six hungry men to feed in a little over two hours. She picked up a potato, started peeling. She’d come to Montana to work. She’d taken the temporary job at Copper Mountain Ranch to get some distance from her family this Christmas, and working on the Paradise Valley cattle ranch would give her new memories. Like the snow piling up outside the window. She’d never lived in a place that snowed like this. Where she came from in Central California, they didn’t have snow, they had fog. Thick soupy Tule fog that blanketed the entire valley, socking in airports, making driving nearly impossible. And on the nights when the fog lifted and temperatures dropped beneath the cold clear sky, the citrus growers rushed to light smudge pots to protect their valuable, vulnerable orange crops. Her family didn’t grow oranges. Her family were Dutch dairy people. Harley had been raised on a big dairy farm in Visalia, and she’d marry a dairyman in college, and they’d had their own dairy, too. But that’s the part she needed to forget. That’s why she’d come to Montana, with its jagged mountains and rugged river valleys and long cold winters. She’d arrived here the Sunday following Thanksgiving and would work through mid-January, when Brock Sheenan’s housekeeper returned from a personal leave of absence. In January, Harley would either return to California or look for another job in Crawford County. Harley was tempted to stay, as the Bozeman employment agency assured her they’d have no problem finding her a permanent position if she wanted one.

Hannibal seems to have set out from Cartagena about mid-June in 218 B.C. and to have been five months between Cartagena and the plains of the Po. It was, therefore, mid-October at the earliest when he halted at the watershed above Italy and gazed southward. Undoubtedly he had not intended to cross the Alps so late, having hoped, perhaps, to make a start in May. He had been delayed, as has been suggested, by the late arrival of many of his troops from their winter quarters, and delayed again, as we know, by unexpected heavy fighting throughout northern Spain. It would seem, in fact, that his arrival at this point was even later than October, for the setting of the Pleiades would have been visible in the latitude in which he stood during the first fortnight in November in the year 218 B.C.

No one ever stands in a cemetery at midnight, puffing out a breath in mid-winter while the snowflakes gathered at the tips of their eyelashes. I

What on earth is happening here in Germany?’ Maud said: ‘We were doing all right in the mid-twenties. We had a democratic government and a growing economy. But everything was ruined by the Wall Street crash of 1929. Now we’re in the depths of a depression.’ Her voice shook with an emotion that seemed close to grief. ‘You can see a hundred men standing in line for one advertised job. I look at their faces. They’re desperate. They don’t know how they’re going to feed their children. Then the Nazis offer them hope, and they ask themselves: What have I got to lose?

One winter in Manila in the mid-1930s, Wylie walked into the wardroom of his ship, the heavy cruiser Augusta (Captain Chester W. Nimitz commanding), and encountered a “fist-banging argument” between two of the ship’s up-and-coming young officers. At issue was what it took to become skilled at rifle or pistol marksmanship. One officer, Lloyd Mustin, said that only someone born with a special gift could learn to do it well. The other, a marine named Lewis B. Puller, said, “I can take any dumb son of a bitch and teach him to shoot.” Mustin would go on to become one of the Navy’s pioneers in radar-controlled gunnery. Puller would ascend to general, the most decorated U.S. Marine in history. Gesturing to Wylie standing in the doorway, Chesty Puller declared, “I can even teach him.” A ten-dollar bet ensued. The next time the Augusta’s marine detachment found time to do their annual qualifications at the rifle range, Wylie was Puller’s special guest. And by the end of the experiment, he was the proud owner of a Marine medal designating him an expert rifleman. The experience helped Wylie understand both native gifts and teachable skills and predisposed him to work with the rural kids under him. Now he could smile when the sighting of an aircraft approaching at a distant but undetermined range came through the Fletcher’s bridge phones as, “Hey, Cap’n, here’s another one of them thar aero-planes, but don’t you fret none. She’s a fur piece yet.” Wylie was a good enough leader to appreciate what the recruits from the countryside brought to the game. “They were highly motivated,” he said. “They just came to fight.

He had a sudden longing, which wasn't a bit like him now, though it was like the person he had been before the Saxons burned his home, to give Ness things, to bring them and heap them into her lap. New songs and the three stars of Orion's belt, and honey-in-the-comb, and branches of white flowering thorn at mid-winter . . .

Duke Energy, which serviced the Mid-Atlantic states and Florida;

The composite quality of Christmas has been part of the holiday…almost certainly long before there was a Christ owed a mas. There has been a mid December holiday to celebrate the winter solstice by appeasing the sun god and assuring the return of spring since people first noticed the sun’s retreat…and the festival is almost always a festival of supplementary light. The light’s going out in the heavens, so we light one here. The Roman Kalends festival of light, greenery, and gift giving. All were recycles by the early Judeo-Christian followers: the act of lighting candles, the practice of giving gifts, even the use of holly and ivy.

Have you sat on the leaf splattered bench, mid-way between skid-row and the rosy nose down death in the well-kept garden? Felt the wind’s blue grey call unbutton your coat as you squelch the rain from your rotten socks, persisted blurry eyed to know all of the forever far mystery of the countless towns, grimacing at something unspeakable, something buried in the beauty of all those lives, trying, striving, loving and dying running away to the coast to doom to the tomb and the sea, dreamt winter and the candles burning, put your knapsack behind your head and dwelt skyward, feeling the sweet heavy lull of those million lives never known? Have you known your great winding road, those two feet upon the brown earth and smelt the ghost of chance and time riding by relentlessly in the golden fields? Busted your nose in fisticuffs and let some coward have it, then picked him back up and bought him a drink? Forever believed in the sweet sad lonely expression of Man’s days? Of death as nothing, just a cool and bitter forlorn Wednesday in October, the end, but the old brown earth forever there. Have you picked up a pebble and sent it seaward, back upon the endless circle of tide and moon high, moon glad, stirrings of mad nights and lonely fate, lonesome be all our days, ephemeral but joyful for it.

Similarly, the word ‘autumn’ – another borrowing from French, though like ver ultimately deriving from Latin – only appeared in English at the end of the fourteenth century. Before that, the season was hærfest, the origin of Modern English ‘harvest’. With this season, too, there was variety in naming right through the later Middle Ages and the early modern period: ‘harvest’ persisted alongside ‘autumn’ and another term, ‘fall’, first recorded in the mid-sixteenth century.

The rattlesnake represents the very acme of serpentine sophistication. It has superlative sensing organs that exploit infra-red and chemo-sensory stimuli to enable it to locate its prey. It is armed with one of the most powerful of all venoms with which it can inject its victims with surgical precision. It is long-lived and produces its young fully formed and immediately capable of fending for themselves. But it has one vulnerability, one way in which human beings who see rattlesnakes as a threat to their own dominance are able to attack it. In North America, in the northern part of the rattlesnake’s range, winters can be so severe that a cold-blooded snake cannot remain active. So many species that are common elsewhere in North America do not spread far north. Rattlers are among the few that do. They survive the winter by another special adaptation. They have developed the ability to hibernate. On the prairies of the mid-West and north into Canada, they choose to do so in the burrows of prairie dogs, rodents related to marmots. Elsewhere in the woodlands, they find outcrops of rocks that are riven by deep clefts. But such places are not abundant. As autumn approaches and temperatures fall, great numbers of rattlesnakes set out on long cross-country journeys of many miles following traditional routes to the places where they and their parents before them hibernate each year. Some of these wintering dens may contain a thousand individuals. So those human beings who hate snakes and who, in spite of the rattler’s sophisticated early warning system, believe that they are a constant and lethal threat, are also able, at this season of the year, to massacre rattlesnakes in thousands. As a consequence one of the most advanced and wonderfully sophisticated of all snakes — perhaps of all reptiles — is now, in many parts of the territories it once ruled, in real danger of extinction.

Rhys looked at the menagerie of water-animals I'd crafted and said, 'What else?' Perhaps it was the cold, perhaps it was his story, but hoarfrost cracked in my veins, and the wild song of a winter wind howled in my heart. I felt it then- how easy it would be to jump between them, join them together, my powers. Each one of my animals halted mid-air... and froze into perfectly carved bits of ice. One by one, they dropped to the earth. And shattered. They were one. They had come from the same, dark origin, the same eternal wall of power. Once, long ago- before language was invented and the world was new.

The year 423 was a turbulent one for politics. Court intrigue began shortly after the mid-winter death of King Atraxerxes. The eldest son, Xerxes II, seized the throne, only to be murdered 45 days later by his half-brother Sogdianus, who, with one treacherous act suddenly held in his grasp the entire Persian Empire, from the Zagros Mountains to the Mediterranean Sea. While Sogdianus may have had the throne, another son of Atraxerxes had the support and sponsorship of some of Persia’s most powerful landowners. Ochus, son of the Babylonian concubine Costmartidus and satrap of lower Mesopotamia, was living in a spacious rented residence in Babylon when his half-brother ascended the throne. One of Sogdianus’s first imperial acts was to summon his powerful half-brother to the imperial city of Susa—perhaps to put him under the sword and consolidate his own power. When the summons came in the form of an official cuneiform tablet delivered by royal messenger, Ochus had to work fast. His supporters urged him to fight, but they could not immediately provide the means for him to do so—they were land rich but cash poor, and the mercenaries and supplies to fight Sogdianus could only be obtained with silver. With Sogdianus pressing for a reply, they turned to the Murašu family for help. Ochus’s backers mortgaged their vast property holdings in the Euphrates valley to the Murašu and used the proceeds to hire an army. Deserters from the disaffected Persian regulars soon joined them, and when Ochus rode into the city of Susa, it was not as Sogdianus’s prisoner but as his successor. The usurper was usurped. Ochus took the royal title of Darius II.

When I saw her! It was mid day, it was a sunny noon, When she passed through, I felt the shimmer of the moon, And for a moment I believed everything about her was true, Her eyes that radiated with the charm of the day, Her wavy arms that moved like the waves of calm and graceful sea, Her beautiful face that you would notice anyway, And when she passed by, you hoped this is what you would always and forever see, Her every step that led her somewhere, Made you forget your errands and just be with her, Wherever she went, just anywhere, And you imagined a life with her, only with her, And when she spoke to someone else, You cursed the skies for this prejudice, For in that moment you wanted to be this someone, and not anyone else, And you wanted to rewrite the fate’s treatise, So that whenever she talked, she only talked to you, Whenever she passed by someone in the street, She always passed staring at you, And wherever she went, it was just you she intended to meet, But right now, she just passed by and I saw her walk away, Until she had reached far, and become a distant star, And now I only keep gazing at the sky every night and day, And I deal with the never ending inner war, Where she still peeps through all my memories, Where she still makes me believe what I saw was true, And I feel like these helpless daisies, Who can do nothing, but just wait for the winter to pass and hope the sky will once again turn blue, So I am a flower that is rooted in its place and its faith, And I only grow in the field of her beauty, That is what my heart feels and that is what my mind always sayeth, For sometimes to love and to believe is the noblest duty! And I love her still although she is a star so distant, Rescued by my memories that form the only bridge, Between what I felt then , what I so long to feel now, ah it is a feeling so eminent, But I have to live with the star and its distance and volunteer myself for this daily emotional sacrilege! But then, living loving someone is a beautiful feeling, Maybe that is why daisies bloom every year, To witness the kiss of the summer, that magical thing, And for its sake bearing the pain of winter, seems nothing, every year, and every next year!

When I saw her! It was mid day, it was a sunny noon, When she passed through, I felt the shimmer of the moon, And for a moment I believed everything about her was true, Her eyes that radiated with the charm of the day, Her wavy arms that moved like the waves of calm and graceful sea, Her beautiful face that you would notice anyway, And when she passed by, you hoped this is what you would always and forever see, Her every step that led her somewhere, Made you forget your errands, because you only wished to be with her, Wherever she went, just anywhere, And you imagined a life with her, only with her, And when she spoke to someone else, You cursed the skies for this prejudice, For in that moment you wanted to be this someone, and not anyone else, And you wanted to rewrite the fate’s treatise, So that whenever she talked, she only talked to you, Whenever she passed by someone in the street, She first ogled at you, And felt the desire that you were the only one she wished to meet, But right now, she just passed by and I saw her walk away, Until she had reached far, and become a distant star, And now I only keep gazing at the sky every night and day, And I deal with the never ending inner war, Where she still peeps through all my memories, Where she still makes me believe what I saw, and felt in that moment was true, And it makes me feel like these helpless daisies, Who can do nothing, but just wait for the winter to pass and hope the sky will once again turn blue, So I am a flower that is rooted in its place and its faith, And I only grow in the field of her beauty, That is what my heart feels and that is what my mind always sayeth, For sometimes to love and to believe is the noblest duty! And I love her still although she is a star so distant, Rescued by my memories that form the only bridge, Between what I felt then, what I so long to feel now, ah it is a feeling so eminent, But I have to live with the star and its distance and volunteer myself for this daily emotional sacrilege! But then, living loving someone is a beautiful feeling, Maybe that is why daisies bloom every year, To witness the kiss of the summer, that magical thing, And for its sake bearing the pain of winter, seems nothing, every year, and every next year!

Oxford and Cambridge had offered degrees with music since the mid-fifteenth century which mostly focused on musical theory. Music was perceived as a gentlemanly pastime rather than as a serious part of a student’s studies. The best secular opportunity for employment for a musician other than court was as a city wait. Waits were essentially watchmen who patrolled cities and played instruments to assure people all was well. By the mid-sixteenth century they were officially municipal musicians who played at civic occasions and were available for private hire. London owned six waits who, from 1548, were allowed two apprentices each. Waits possessed summer and winter livery of blue gowns and red caps. They wore silver chains and a silver badge displaying the arms of the city. The musicians were in great demand for weddings and an important citizen might employ them when impressing

In mid-1944 Hitler, increasingly deluded and desperate, proclaimed Axis victory was imminent. “Very soon I shall use my triumphal weapons, and then the war will end gloriously . . . Then those gentlemen won’t know what hit them. This is the weapon of the future, and with it Germany’s future is likewise assured.

I've stayed here in Oxford as the seasons have changed, watching summer turn to autumn turn to winter turn to spring. And in the coming cycle, I will be here once more. Season after season, year after year, as crocuses make way for summer honeysuckle, as sun-loving lantana ease out for the quieter mums, as pansies blanket the wintry town and as spring beauties burst forth again behind the snow. I'll still be here with Fisher by my side. Because this spring the stars aligned, as Marian promised they would. I picked a mid-March spray of spirea, made myself a bridal bouquet, and gave my whole heart to the man whose heart was given whole to me.

In fact, everyone else was pretty much bundled up in winter coats, scarves, and the like (although in Li’s case the heavy clothing was less functional and more of an accessory to make sure he fit in). I, on the other hand, in my mid- length leather jacket, had not dressed as warmly as the others, but I didn’t have to. With the ability to raise my core body temperature, I could have walked through a blizzard in a pair of swimming trunks and been fine. Like Li, however, it was important that I keep up appearances, so I chose to go out dressed somewhat appropriately for the weather rather than as a member of the local Polar Bear Club.

Unable to take one more second, Andi Williams spun around and hit the power button on the stereo. Bing Crosby’s Winter Wonderland cut off mid-wonder and blissful silence filled the space.

THE CRIMSON QUEEN   She comes to me at the mid-nightmare passing Temptress of winter snowfall in black leathers Within the forest where the snakes are hissing Among the moonlit trees and dying heathers Vampiric succubus from homes of the dead Honey in my ear, I recall what was said:   “You will love me, your Queen of the dead Worship me, or I will take your head.”   So I rest my head on her frozen bosom I’m subjugated to her loathsome Sodoms Her fingers, grasping, from the darkest reaches Those lips of suction are just like leeches Entwined arms that offer me no salvation A barbed tongue lapping at my lacerations   “My crimson queen, my strength starts to wane” I cried to her, in pleasurable pain   The blood-red candles have burned down to their wicks Illuminated fantasies born from the sick Manticore mistress drenched in gorgon’s blood I break wide open to release the flood My intestines burst forth, their gushing out Into the black void of Lillith’s mouth

For some days past there has been little less than a famine in the camp,” Washington said in mid-February. Before winter’s end, some 2,500 men, almost a quarter of the army, perished from disease, famine, or the cold.

That is their work, they imply, and they also imply that you, and your actual work, are fine but also neglectful and sad. They don’t say that, though. They say, Don’t worry if you can’t be there, at the mid-fall solstice sing-along, the late-winter sledding-song craft fair and potluck. Not a big deal with the mid-spring parent-student doubles badminton under-the-lights evening funmaker. No problem with the mother-daughter pajama party on every third Wednesday movie day Sound of Music bring your own guitar or lyre. No need to bring treats on your child’s birthday. No need to come in for career day. No need to swing by the opening of the new art studio which features real clay-throwing technology. Don’t care about art? Not an issue. No need, no need, no need, it’s fine, no problem, though you really are selfish and your children doomed. When they are first to try crack—they will try it and love it and sell it to our culture-loving children—we will know why.

I found myself telling her about an evening some years before, when I was alone at home with my two sons. It was winter; it had been dark since mid-afternoon and the boys were becoming restless. Their father was out, driving back from somewhere. We were waiting for him to come home. I membered the feeling of tension in the room, which seemed to be related to the provisionality of the situation, the fact that we were waiting. The boys kept asking when he would be back and I too kept looking at the clock, waiting for time to pass. Yet I knew that nothing different or particularly important would happen when he got back. It was merely that something was being stretched to breaking point by his absence, something to do with belief: it was as though our ability to believe in ourselves, in our home and our family and in who we said we were, was being worn so thin it might give way entirely. I remembered the pressing feeling of reality, just under the surface of things, like a secret I was struggling to contain. I realized that I didn’t want to be there, in that room. I wanted to go out and walk across the fields in the dark, or go to a city where there was excitement and glamour, or be anywhere where the compulsion of waiting wasn’t lying on me like lead. I wanted to be free. The boys began to argue and fight, in the way that they often did. And this too seemed all at once like a form that could be broken, could be suddenly and shockingly transgressed. We were in the kitchen and I was making something for them to eat at the long stone counter. The boys were at the other end, sitting on stools. My younger son was pestering the older one, wanting him to play with him, and the older one was becoming increasingly irritated. I stopped what I was doing, intending to intervene in their fight, when I saw my older son suddenly take his brother’s head in his hands and drive it down hard against the countertop. The younger one fell immediately to the floor, apparently unconscious, and the older one left him there and ran out of the room. This show of violence, the like of which had never happened in our house before, was not simply shocking – it also concretised something I appeared already to know, to the extent that I believed my children had merely acted in the service of this knowledge, that they had been driven to enact something that they themselves didn’t realise or understand. It was another year before their father moved out of the house, but if I had to locate the moment when the marriage had ended it would be then, on that dark evening in the kitchen, when he wasn’t even there.

Reindeer and caribou are the only species of Cervidae in which antlers grow on females. According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, both male and female reindeer grow antlers each summer. Male reindeer drop their antlers at the beginning of winter, usually late November to mid-December, while female reindeer retain their antlers until after they give birth in spring. (According to historical renditions depicting Santa’s reindeer, every one of them had to be female.)

I knew you forever and you were always old, soft white lady of my heart. Surely you would scold me for sitting up late, reading your letters, as if these foreign postmarks were meant for me. You posted them first in London, wearing furs and a new dress in the winter of eighteen-ninety. I read how London is dull on Lord Mayor's Day, where you guided past groups of robbers, the sad holes of Whitechapel, clutching your pocketbook, on the way to Jack the Ripper dissecting his famous bones. This Wednesday in Berlin, you say, you will go to a bazaar at Bismarck's house. And I see you as a young girl in a good world still, writing three generations before mine. I try to reach into your page and breathe it back… but life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack. This is the sack of time your death vacates. How distant your are on your nickel-plated skates in the skating park in Berlin, gliding past me with your Count, while a military band plays a Strauss waltz. I loved you last, a pleated old lady with a crooked hand. Once you read Lohengrin and every goose hung high while you practiced castle life in Hanover. Tonight your letters reduce history to a guess. The count had a wife. You were the old maid aunt who lived with us. Tonight I read how the winter howled around the towers of Schloss Schwobber, how the tedious language grew in your jaw, how you loved the sound of the music of the rats tapping on the stone floors. When you were mine you wore an earphone. This is Wednesday, May 9th, near Lucerne, Switzerland, sixty-nine years ago. I learn your first climb up Mount San Salvatore; this is the rocky path, the hole in your shoes, the yankee girl, the iron interior of her sweet body. You let the Count choose your next climb. You went together, armed with alpine stocks, with ham sandwiches and seltzer wasser. You were not alarmed by the thick woods of briars and bushes, nor the rugged cliff, nor the first vertigo up over Lake Lucerne. The Count sweated with his coat off as you waded through top snow. He held your hand and kissed you. You rattled down on the train to catch a steam boat for home; or other postmarks: Paris, verona, Rome. This is Italy. You learn its mother tongue. I read how you walked on the Palatine among the ruins of the palace of the Caesars; alone in the Roman autumn, alone since July. When you were mine they wrapped you out of here with your best hat over your face. I cried because I was seventeen. I am older now. I read how your student ticket admitted you into the private chapel of the Vatican and how you cheered with the others, as we used to do on the fourth of July. One Wednesday in November you watched a balloon, painted like a silver abll, float up over the Forum, up over the lost emperors, to shiver its little modern cage in an occasional breeze. You worked your New England conscience out beside artisans, chestnut vendors and the devout. Tonight I will learn to love you twice; learn your first days, your mid-Victorian face. Tonight I will speak up and interrupt your letters, warning you that wars are coming, that the Count will die, that you will accept your America back to live like a prim thing on the farm in Maine. I tell you, you will come here, to the suburbs of Boston, to see the blue-nose world go drunk each night, to see the handsome children jitterbug, to feel your left ear close one Friday at Symphony. And I tell you, you will tip your boot feet out of that hall, rocking from its sour sound, out onto the crowded street, letting your spectacles fall and your hair net tangle as you stop passers-by to mumble your guilty love while your ears die.

Evening Markets On Wednesday evenings from mid-November to the end of February the Summer Night Market takes over. It’s a lively social event featuring hawker-style food stalls, bars and music and dance performances. There's also a Winter Night Market each Wednesday evening in August.

On a cold mid winter's night, I touched poetry by snowflakes that enlightened my eyes!

Rob looked to be in his mid-thirties. About his own age. A man at the peak of his abilities.

I think I am right in saying, my dear, that you were born in mid-winter?

Don’t be such a baby,” Sam said to Brandt lightly. “You’ve made it through five Estonian winters. I think you can handle New York in mid-December.

Mid-winter and meat locker chilly,

In the bleak mid-winter Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone.