of the season. Up before sunrise yesterday for a very cold walk. It was six degrees here at 6:30 a.m. the previous morning. Winter has finally arrived, and I am straying from the wood stove only to fill the bird feeders and defrost the chicken water.

The neatest thing was seeing all the fox tracks in the snow. I haven’t seen a fox in ages and thought they’d ceded the yard to Tucker in their canine turf war. However, they left tons of evidence that they are very much still in residence. Here’s where they went under the chicken coop.

And poked around the clean out door, no doubt sniffing the delicious dinner sleepily roosting just out of reach.

And failing to gain entry, they hopped into the little run behind the coop to try their luck with that side!

But I have the nicest, tightest coop in the East, thanks to my dad and a heatwave construction blitz, so the fox had to look elsewhere for its meal.

It’s eighteen degrees and snowing again now, and looking downright wintery outside. It’s hard to believe that just a few days ago Tucker and I were enjoying 72-degree days and the sunrise at the beach!

To me the winter solstice is all about light.

After days of clouds and rain and a wild, windy night, the dawn sun blasted over Buck Mountain with streaming golden light.

Wherever you are, I hope you let the light in today.

Happy Solstice from Bonafide Farm.

So Hurricane Sandy has come and gone. She brought many hours of wind so loud that it sounded like an ocean inside my house—ironic given how many people ended up with actual ocean in their homes from this storm. Just before four on Monday the power went out as I had anticipated it would.

Except for the awful wind noise outside, I was pretty cozy with the Jotul fired up for the first time this season. The wind blew rain down the chimney, rain penetrated the seal between chimney and roof and ran down the front of my fireplace, inside. All night long I listened to rainwater sizzle as it hit the hot stove pipe. Thankfully the blizzard warning my area was under never amounted to any snow, but from my house I can see snow in the Blue Ridge mountains to the west.

In the morning I went out to survey the damage. The well house lost quite a few more shingles from its roof, a trend begun with the derecho in June. Tree branches fell, screens flew out of windows, the garden was smashed.

I’d come home from my trip to the prettiest stand of snow peas I’d ever grown, just starting to form pods and full of flowers, underplanted with thriving arugula:

After Sandy:

And my dahlias are toast. Before the storm, that orange one below stood taller than my 5′8″ height.

After Sandy:

Compared to many other folks, I got off easy with this one and have no right to complain. Twenty-four hours without power was no big deal, and nothing but the garden suffered irreparable damage. It’s the end of the season, so it’s only a matter of days until frost blackens most of those plants anyway. But it is my favorite season in the garden, when moisture tends to be plentiful, heat and bugs relent, and most crops and flowers are on autopilot and keep surprising with unexpected last-minute gifts made all the more precious because I know that each harvest could be the last of the year.

Anyway, Sandy has cleared out and now it’s time to go pick up tree branches, fix the blackberry cages that were leveled, collect the well house shingles that are scattered about the yard, and see what I can salvage from the garden.

I hope that wherever you are you weathered well.

One of my lavender orpington pullets came online today and laid her first egg. That extra light in the morning must be working. Here’s her egg on the right, next to Iris’s daily contribution. Not bad for a pullet egg—and she even managed to get it in the nest box! I am excited to see the other young hens start to contribute to the daily egg count.

In other news, I ran out to the garage this evening—in my slippers—to retrieve something from the car. On my way out I looked down and saw this:

Looks like I’d smashed this black widow on the floor! That’s pretty close for comfort…weird too as last Friday night I dreamed I was bitten by something on my foot, I saw two marks and dream-assumed it was a snake bite but maybe it was a spider warning!

If you had any doubt, I flipped this lady over to show her identifying red hourglass. She was pretty good-sized!

Tonight’s our first taste of the coming winter. It’s in the low 40s and grey and rainy. My house is about 63 degrees without the central heat yet on and I am eying the woodstove with longing. Too many other things to do tonight to get involved with the first fire of the season, so that will have to wait and in the meantime I am in triple layers of wool and sheepskin. Plus, it’s supposed to return to the 70s later this week!

After a day’s worth of thunderstorms finally tracked away, I stood outside while the fog crept up from the foothills and over my back field. By the time the light had totally faded, I was enfolded in a cloud.