By the end of the day it had turned cold with a bitter wind. Heavy snow was approaching and the puddles were freezing crystals on the surface. Just a bit earlier, however, the weather was milder, almost approaching warm if you had two jackets, warm up pants, gloves, hat and a hand warmer. It was the last days of Fall.
Attracted first by the red tree and then by the complexity of the green porch up against that red, I stopped for an hour or two to paint this.....although it seemed longer in the wind.
Into the 1970's, coal was still being mined in Roslyn....that was a few years before it became the set for Northern Exposure. Eons before that (careful, I like natural history) it was an island that ran into what would become North America. The swamps surrounding that island became the coal under the town and in Black Diamond on the other side of the mountain range. The Cascades came later, rising up to split what had been the island mass, leaving half of it on the west and the rest on the east side. Near Cle Elum are outcrops of sandstone, the old shoreline.
So I drove back that evening, passing through an almost blizzard....but it felt great to have gotten away for the day.
