Winter

By the time we hit July the new green leaves of May and June are losing their lustre and getting chewed by all sorts of insects and one begins to hear complaints about the heat and the flies, as if folks are forgetting how they longed for this time through the short days and long months of winter.

The truth is that many of us are more at home with winter. Summer feels transient; like a few days sitting on a beach down south; nice, but not where we belong. It is the rigors of winter that shape our character and it is snow rather than sunburn that leaves the deepest mark on our collective psyche. For a good part of the year we look out on a snow-covered landscape.

One Christmas morning I woke up to most remarkable snowfall. It had turned the chicken wire around the garden into the most delicate of lace. The trees seemed to have been touched by a magic wand. It was the sort of scene that one would photograph just to prove that the real world could look like this - but I cannot imagine capturing it on canvas.

The fairyland quality of such a morning soon dissipates when the wind picks up and shakes the lace from the fences and the snow from the branches and makes the trees look ragged – and when you have to shovel the stuff. But a more real beauty remains and changes constantly like the surface of the sea. Light on snow changes from the yellow-orange of the sunrise to the deep blues of the dusk. The wind sculpts unceasingly and the drift pack will often look like frozen breakers.

I am jealous of my wind-sculpted snow-covered fields. I want to preserve their beauty. Water will spill back to fill the space that a passing boat leaves. A snowmobile leaves a track that the wind takes much longer to fill and, in the new snow, the track always looks more like a scar to me. A snowshoe track is somehow more honest damage to the landscape.

Animal tracks are a wonder to me. Like photographs, they stop time; not just stop it but preserve it in a way one can follow again. On a dry summer day I can only imagine a deer in my back field the night before. In the snow I know it was there and where it went.

#Photography #nature #art #bird