Life Goes On As Spring Approaches

17 March 2012
8:45 AM

Sunrise at	8:00 AM	in direction	91°	East
Sunset at	8:00 PM	in direction	270°	West

Duration of day: 11 hours, 59 minutes (6 minutes, 43 seconds longer than yesterday)

Interior spring sky through the tree tops

I did not post yesterday and I am not going to attempt to recover that day - these things happen.  At our core, being human means our lives are much the same even if we live in different circumstances.  Our culture can differ, our locale can differ, our accepted rites and rituals can differ.  But humans seek companions, food, warmth, safety and love in much the same way throughout the planet.

Yesterday was a day focused on the simple details of being human more than the details of being human in Interior Alaska.  I took soup over to my daughter who has been down with a virus for several days.  I joined Gary on two conference calls regarding plans for his health.  I had dinner with my dear friend at Gambardella's Pasta Bella.  I tended our animal companions, did laundry, swept floors, cleaned sinks, and continued to sort through mail.

Ruby colored tree tops across the hills above Farmer's Loop

In short, it was a day much like any other day for humans on planet earth.  There were a few things that would distinguish my day from that of a resident of Tucson, of course.  As Vera and I left for dinner from her house and for whatever reason, we both stopped to contemplate the snow still piled high everywhere.   Our thoughts followed the same track; we are very ready for spring and yet love the whiteness and texture of the snow .. paradoxes continues to underlay our lives.  And then coming home, an arch of aurora filled the sky, shaped like a rainbow from horizon to horizon.  It was the front line of intense aurora activity about to assault earthly skies.

Suggestion of red buds at tree tops

And, I took these pictures which may, or may not, show the differences in tree limb and bud color across the hillsides as they prepare to follow break up with rapid leaf out.  I did see willow buds in a couple of places, but not enough to photograph yet.  Birch have leaf branches all along the length of the tree whereas aspen tend to cluster leafs at the top.  As I thought, capturing the intensity of the color without a telephoto lens was not entirely successful, but the photos do reveal differences in branch and bud color across the landscape.

The chief difficulty in taking these photos was getting decent framing around telephone poles, which are absolutely everywhere in the hills near the city.  I would do better to drive out farther and I will most definitely later this spring as I continue to mark the changes in the season.

Aspen clusters, birch interlopers, and sky, sky, sky

I normally would not include as much sky as I did in the photo above, but isn't the color amazing?  The photo shows a healthy aspen family in the center.  Looking closely, the tendency of aspen to cluster leaves near the top of the tree is apparent.  At the very top of hill is a section that is lower than the other tree line.  These are birch that apparently filled in after a former swathe of clear cut was left to reseed.

Birch at the curve in the road, aspen in the distance

I wanted to remove the road out of this photo and in fact did an extract of the small portion of the view without any road or telephone lines.  But the conversion from JPEG to TIFF and back to JPEG for loading into the blogger degraded the image to the point where the change in color was vsible, but the overall image was fuzzy.  However, there is value is showing a typical neighborhood road in the hills near the University of Fairbanks on the west side of town.