9×12 Oil on Canvas

This is a portrait commisssion of a very active little dog who rarely stops hunting,  unless she’s sitting on my friend Neal’s lap.  Then Cookie is a cuddly as you please.  I cannot believe this little dog can catch the things she does or that she can make her way through snow drifts with such aplomb!

Here is a winter-inspired poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson to take our minds away from the drought-ridden, hot Midwest and to summon cooler weather.

The Snowstorm

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,

Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,

Seems nowhere to alight:   the whited air

Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,

And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.

The sled and a traveller stopped, the courier’s feet

Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit

Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed

In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north wind’s masonry.

Out of an unseen quarry evermore

Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer

Curves his white bastions with projected roof

Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.

Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work

So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he

For number or proportion.  Mockingly,

On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;

A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;

Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall,

Maugre the farmer sighs; and at the gate

A tapering turret overtops the work.

And when his hours are numbered,

and the world

Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,

Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art

To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,

Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,

The frolic architecture of the snow.

It would be so cozy to be reading by a fireplace, wrapped in a blanket with a hot toddy, listening with half an ear to the wind howling as the snowflakes swirl outside the window.