Maria can’t bear to throw living things in the garbage, she wants to return them to nature, she brought the daisies I got her outside and I saw this one in the snow, out in the very cruel cold – it was – 8 mid-morning here. Winter can be beautiful here, it can be harsh, I feel for the normally hardy sheep and donkeys in cold like this, there are few things we can do for them. They have shelter in the Pole Barn – the big arctic storm is due to hit hardest tonight but they are restless, anxious, hungry. We keep heated water buckets full, to warm their insides, I see it is hard for them to stand on the snow and ice.

My frost-bitten fingers protest when I go outside, they ache, only Red seems undeterred by the cold, hardly aware of it, we can only go out for a few minutes at a time, and it is expected to get savagely cold and windy tonight – 18, with a wind chill of -25. We are putting out extra hay, scattering old hay across the concrete floor of the stall and throughout the Pole Barn. We are graining the sheep and the donkeys twice a day, ferrying warm and fresh water to the chicken roost, it freezes within minutes. The wind is blowing fine snow through the back of the house, we don’t have storm windows  yet and the two wood stoves are going round the clock. The big and cold and windy stuff is coming tonight, I suspect  we will be up and down all night checking on the animals, the pipes. The windows are covered in frost, except near the wood stoves where the dogs are huddling, and the barn cats too.

We have to fill the water buckets in the bathtub and ferry them out to the pasture, the outdoor faucets are all frozen solid.

This morning, my car window shattered as I tried to open it to see out when I ran to the hardware store for birdseed – we are running out and this is no time to leave the birds without seed or suet. I imagine something froze inside. It was a hairy ride to a window repair shop, snow and ice blowing in, fortunately there is one down the road, I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere for a day or so. I hope they can fix it today. Dan, the Time Warner cable repair man came this morning, and helped get the TV cable working, we may need it over the next few days.

The cruel cold is different from ordinary cold, it alters matter.

This round is a long haul, it will be bitter cold for days. I wonder how to photograph bitter cold, which lens to use. My camera froze for the first time this morning, the shutter wouldn’t activate, that has never happened to me before. But first, I got this photo of Maria’s daisy, it seems so beautiful and evocative out in the cruel cold.