another mood of winter
Nov. 30th, 2010 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
julesjonesThis morning was different again. There was snow lying when I looked out of the window at breakfast time, thick enough to cover the paving blocks in white, though not thick enough to hide the outlines of each individual block. Snow lying, and snow falling, a thin but steady addition to that already underfoot.
The air temperature was a little warmer today, though a breeze had got up that took the apparent temperature straight back down again. Yesterday's pearlescent glow of the airborne flakes was gone, lost against the whiteness of the snow on the ground. In the park the snow was still mostly crunching underfoot, but once I got off the bus in town it was a different matter. The snow on the path through the open air bus station was unsurprisingly already a brownish grey churned up by passing pedestrians, still mostly solid in the cold air but slushy in places. On Market Street the snow was still white on the pavements, with a narrow path next to the buildings where the snow had either not fallen in the lee, or had melted from the residual heat of the stonework, and drained away. A little further out the weight of feet had melted patches of snow, leaving some to re-freeze in icy patches. People were walking carefully, in that fast flat mincing gait that keeps up speed but keeps one's feet in contact with the ground as much as possible.
The snow through this pedestrianised area was still clean even where it had been trodden down, giving a festive wintry scene walking past the shop windows decorated for the Christmas shopping season. Even so, there was a reminder of the other side of winter, in the shape of a small feathered corpse in the lee of a shop doorway. One of the feral pigeons hadn't made it through yet another freezing night, and had quite literally fallen off its perch in one of the crevices of the building. There will doubtless be more of them by the end of the week, although it's rare to see the direct evidence, only a diminishing number of them dodging around people's feet by the food stalls in the Christmas market. Time to break out the fat balls for the small birds in my garden.
The air temperature was a little warmer today, though a breeze had got up that took the apparent temperature straight back down again. Yesterday's pearlescent glow of the airborne flakes was gone, lost against the whiteness of the snow on the ground. In the park the snow was still mostly crunching underfoot, but once I got off the bus in town it was a different matter. The snow on the path through the open air bus station was unsurprisingly already a brownish grey churned up by passing pedestrians, still mostly solid in the cold air but slushy in places. On Market Street the snow was still white on the pavements, with a narrow path next to the buildings where the snow had either not fallen in the lee, or had melted from the residual heat of the stonework, and drained away. A little further out the weight of feet had melted patches of snow, leaving some to re-freeze in icy patches. People were walking carefully, in that fast flat mincing gait that keeps up speed but keeps one's feet in contact with the ground as much as possible.
The snow through this pedestrianised area was still clean even where it had been trodden down, giving a festive wintry scene walking past the shop windows decorated for the Christmas shopping season. Even so, there was a reminder of the other side of winter, in the shape of a small feathered corpse in the lee of a shop doorway. One of the feral pigeons hadn't made it through yet another freezing night, and had quite literally fallen off its perch in one of the crevices of the building. There will doubtless be more of them by the end of the week, although it's rare to see the direct evidence, only a diminishing number of them dodging around people's feet by the food stalls in the Christmas market. Time to break out the fat balls for the small birds in my garden.