A cock step longer !

We in Ireland are enduring the coldest early winter in living memory - the lowest temperatures in late November since records began and heavy snowfalls and minus 14degrees celsius in the first week of December There are icicles hanging from the eaves of houses and rural untreated roads are impassible .

Soon it will be the Winter Solstice, Yuletide, Christmas - the festival of the rebirth of the sun, when the sun begins to gain strength again and even in the depths of winter we are reminded that life will begin again.

After the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice, the days begin to lengthen, my mother taught me, by the time span of a cocks step. Even in the coldest winter hope of Spring returning keeps us going

"Frosted Forest "(watercolour )

Good morning beautiful world !

(A cock step longer !)"Fox Alert" Acrylic  

Icicles by my door 

Studio in Snow  -December

Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me

Poem by Emily Dickinson