Mary Novaria

Image: leozc/Pixabay The trees in the yard are frosted like vanilla-coconut cupcakes. Pointy icicles hang from the north side of the house. Sometimes I break one off and give it to the dog, like a stick. Today those spiky rods are rock solid, and I wonder, for no particular reason, if they really have been used as weapons. Murder and melt. Evidence gone. Maybe I’ve been watching too many British crime dramas.   In Colorado, snow falls on the roof, then melts, then refreezes. This is called ice damming.   There is also a thing called ice damning .    I made it up after getting stuck near the top of the driveway last week. It was a great introduction to our home for my high school bestie who’d just flown in for the weekend. I stopped the car before reaching the top to aim my remote at the garage door, not realizing there was a layer of ice under a dusting of snow. I swear it hadn’t been there when I left for the airport earlier. When I couldn’t get traction, I beg...

  John and I went camping a couple of weeks ago. Toasty fire. Dinner by flashlight. Scrabble by candlelight. “All Things Considered” on a hand-cranked radio. If I’d had more notice, I’d have had the makings of ‘smores on hand. But this wasn’t one of those adventures for which you plan ahead (unless you are one of our overachieving neighbors with a generator). This was an accidental campout.  It began at 7:45 on a Monday morning, when our little rural mountain electric co-op texted that we were part of a widespread outage. That we got the text at all was amazing, since our cell service up here generally ranges from zero to half a bar.  We heat the house with propane, but we need electricity to turn on the furnace. The house was cold and would get chillier as the day wore on. John and I sat in bed and stared at our phones while wearing puffy jackets and stocking caps. No hot coffee. No hot tea. No hot anything. The text from the co-op estimated our power would return betwee...

The sun came out this morning revealing blue sky for the first time in days. The snow started late on Labor Day evening and fell throughout Tuesday, bookending a short summer that began with a Memorial Day weekend storm. Snow in September is not the norm here, even at 9,500 feet. We lost a tree outside the kitchen window. There are broken branches on the ground which will give my husband a chance to use the chainsaw he bought this summer. We are becoming mountain people.   I am astounded by the resilience of the Aspens. Some of them bowed to the ground for three days, still-green leaves heavy with ice. This morning, they stood upright having shaken off the early winter assault.   Yesterday, under a thick blanket of fog, the thaw began with the rhythm of a rainforest as the Aspens, Lodgepole pines, spruce and firs shed their melting snow. When the showers continued this morning, I began to reflect on things that fall from the sky.   Things like ash.     On Septem...

Published 6/1/2020 Working puzzles used to be something reserved for family beach vacations. On multigenerational trips to South Carolina or Oregon, there has always been a table in a corner with a puzzle in progress. Like two of my sisters in law, I can barely tear myself away while others, like my husband, can’t be bothered.  I’m on my third quarantine picture puzzle, which should be a cinch since it’s only 500 pieces. The nostalgia of a vacation pastime has given way to a daily obsession with both the jigsaw and word variety during coronavirus quarantine. The popular Wordscapes has joined the Scrabble app and Words with Friends on my iPhone, and I also work a daily crossword puzzle. Continue reading here.

My husband, John, and I came back to our new home in Colorado after a week away. Before we left, the aspens in our yard had just barely started to turn. Still mostly green, a few edges of flickering coins yielding to yellow. The evergreens in the mountains around us had been spiked with patches of gold for a few weeks. We’d driven around reveling in the glory of them, looking forward to their splendor in our first fall here. But the trees in our yard and others in our neighborhood were slower to turn. I wondered why. Altitude? Moisture? Our friend Alan had told us shortly after we’d moved in that we wouldn’t believe our luck when the grove in our yard turned that spectacular, shimmering gold. We left for Kansas City the night before we’d planned because the meteorologists predicted snow. Not just an early autumn dusting, but an actual winter storm. It wasn’t even the middle of October! But what did I expect in the Rockies? Our seven years in Los Angeles had ...

Funny how the mind works and makes connections. Is it just writers who go to wacky places, dredging up long-forgotten memories and burrowing down into the proverbial internet rabbit hole? Or do we all do it? My friend Judy texted me a story about a wildlife refuge here in Colorado where the prairie dogs have been infected with the plague . Seriously, how medieval is that? The Washington Post story stated: “Though the plague can be treated with antibiotics, it has a dark history.”   Ya think? And here I’ve been worried about what I would do if a bear comes into the yard while I’m in the hot tub. Turns out the Rocky Mountain National Wildlife Refuge is clear on the other side of Denver – more than an hour away. So, phew, I don’t need to worry about the Black Death today. You can believe I’ll steer clear of that place until the plague is eradicated. It did get me thinking about prairie dogs, though. Some years ago, when we lived in Kansas...