photography: February 2011 Archives
One of the fun things about winter—it's winter, where I live—is that you wake up and everything, literally everything, in the world outside is completely different from how it was when you went to sleep. That wooden chair in the neighbor's yard?
It's very different from the day before. And the snow then starts telling stories—a bird walked here, a deer there, a skier crossed this hill, the neighbor got in his car and drove away, whatever.
And then sometimes the snow tells bizarre stories that aren't even true, or that were true once, years ago, in the Alps, but even that once was amazingly unlikely. Long story short, I'm practicing the piano, take a moment's break, look out at the sidewalk, and see a face half-buried in the snow. Eyes, nose, one ear emerging from the ice, it was all there, the way they found the previously mentioned Otzi the Iceman in the mountains. It was one of those strange moments that pull you up short, like when Scrooge saw Marley's face in the door knocker. People complain about the snow, but that seems wrong to me, when it works so hard and so successfully to entertain. Yes, you have to shovel it away, and walk carefully when it's slippery, but I think that's a small enough price to pay.
It's very different from the day before. And the snow then starts telling stories—a bird walked here, a deer there, a skier crossed this hill, the neighbor got in his car and drove away, whatever.
And then sometimes the snow tells bizarre stories that aren't even true, or that were true once, years ago, in the Alps, but even that once was amazingly unlikely. Long story short, I'm practicing the piano, take a moment's break, look out at the sidewalk, and see a face half-buried in the snow. Eyes, nose, one ear emerging from the ice, it was all there, the way they found the previously mentioned Otzi the Iceman in the mountains. It was one of those strange moments that pull you up short, like when Scrooge saw Marley's face in the door knocker. People complain about the snow, but that seems wrong to me, when it works so hard and so successfully to entertain. Yes, you have to shovel it away, and walk carefully when it's slippery, but I think that's a small enough price to pay.
