On the Edge of Winter

Here we are on the cusp between autumn and winter. There is an element of impatience in the voices of Canada geese as they fly over the house, and all the other migrating wild creatures who are still here seem agitated and anxious to be off on their adventures.

I'm restless too, and words alone don't quite "do it" for me; nor do images, at least most of the time. Morning after morning, I scribble a few words and regard them with mild disdain. I prowl through old photos, looking for an image that adequately describes the dark foggy daybreak beyond the windows, the frosted garden grasses and wilting shrubbery, the bare and eloquent trees.

Archive prowling at the break of day is a perilous undertaking through volume after volume of photo archives and disk after disk of images, all leaving something to be desired. At times, I ponder flogging the cameras to a pawn shop and taking up soap operas or macrame.

What I really need right at these times are sunlight and clear skies, a few inches of snow and an hour or two of wandering the woods on snowshoes: cameras slung around my neck, pockets crammed with filters, lenses and other photographic trappings, food for the birds and Spencer's homemade doggy biscuits too.

Out of the wind on such wanderings, there's fine blue stillness and pools of articulate silence, long resonant conversations with the dreaming trees. Camus wrote that in the depths of winter, he discovered within himself an invincible summer. I suspect that for this old hen, what lies invincible within is early highland winter in all its grandeur.  For all my crankiness about past photographic efforts, images of bare trees, fog and hills with morning light shining through them still catch me by the throat and leave me breathless, every single time.