Next to Autumn, Winter is my favorite season. I like cold weather, and I’d rather have it too cold than too warm. You can always bundle up against the cold, but you can’t get more naked than naked when it’s too hot. And believe me, I experienced both situations during my two years in grad school in Minneapolis in the 1970s. I’m sorry I don’t have any photos from those years, but I do have some excellent memories.

My all-time favorite winter photo that I have taken is this one from 2011. It got pretty cold around here in Western Washington, and we got a lot of snow. I stepped out my front door, and this is what I saw.

I remember that it was ghostly quiet, with whatever sounds there were, muffled by the snow everywhere.

In our backyard, when it snows and much movement stops, our backyard becomes a winter wonderland, with various birds visiting our seed and suet feeders.

This little Townsend’s Warbler comes back every year.

Even with all that snow on the ground, I would drive to work every day. These trees were on property not too far from my work, and I captured this while stopped at a traffic light.

The town of Leavenworth really makes a big show of Winter, with lights on every building, sledding down the grassy hill downtown, and horse-drawn carriages taking tourists around the town.

This little guy was frolicking in the snowy yard.

So was this Varied Thrush. Our yard is Grand Central Station for the birds in winter, so we keep two suet feeders and one seed feeder full for them.

This event was a big part of my winter, for about 15 years. A local Unitarian church put on a full-length sing along/play along Messiah on the day after Christmas. They packed the place to the rafters with singers, and the front with players every year. That’s my violin on the chair at the bottom right, since I took the photo. For the orchestra, it was like playing with a huge choir, and more than once I paid so much attention to the choir that I missed an entrance! The same people would come year after year, and I even had an informal stand partner who I would see only there, since she lived as far south as I did north. Well, Covid restrictions put paid to that event. The city of Seattle forbid such large gatherings for 2020, and I imagine that many people were, and still are, afraid of any kind of crowd. Many of the singers were elderly and may have died. In any case, the church no longer puts on this event, and I checked their web site, and it doesn’t even say anything about it. The cultural and musical landscape of Seattle are the poorer for it.

Here’s the Link to the Original Post. And Tina’s, and Patti’s.