It’s winter here, and the bone-deep, bleached cold of the prairie seeps into everything. Last year, epically huge snowstorms replaced the more-normal, rain-shadow dry, gray frozen world of Southern Idaho with neck deep snowdrifts and tons & tons of the sort of snowpack we wish for but rarely achieve. This year, it’s back to normal, at least for now, and the bare, hard ground seems welcomely, bleakly normal by comparison to 2016-17’s Winter Snowmeggedon. Perhaps if I loved winter sports I would be disappointed, but I don’t, and all I can hope is that we sort of stay right where we are weather-wise, because it just isn’t all that bad. I mean, the Weatherman and the traffic reporter on the morning local news radio have had relatively little to report. Thank the weather gods. Fortunately, we’ve had some rain, and there are still photo opportunities.
Although I’ve never loved winter, there’s just something about the way water freezes, be it frost, Ice, hoar rime, pogonip, or just a mud puddle, that is magical and geometrically lovely. It never ceases to amaze me how many different ways ice can form and be beautiful. If photography was a seasonal sport, I would have to say, winter is, indeed, my favorite time of year. I often spend hours taking hundreds of photos on a single morning of hoar frost and daybreak. And ice forms on a small, or large, body of water in so many beautiful ways, some I have never seen more than once in my life. A mud hole can become an enthralling art installation. You just have to “see” it.
Look closely at the world, my friends, it’s far more interesting than you might think at a glance. The photo posted above here is just one day of ice I found particularly and geometrically enchanting. It formed that way for a week or so, and I have never seen it do that again. The black photo of the Frost Flowers was truly a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon. In the 40 years I’ve lived in this country of frozen winters, I’ve only seen it once. The black background of the photo was black ice on my horse water tank. the Frost Flowers were quarter-sized, all over the top. I looked them up and found they often form on frozen arctic oceans, large, like the size of lotus flowers.
Photos like this are the sort of thing that will grace these pages as often as I discover yet another moment to capture. In conjunction with the release of the novel “Silverhorn,” my publisher has designed this lovely author website. I am in the throes of loading content to here, more every day, which she then patiently resizes and restyles so it doesn’t go all wonky and create chaos on your computers, or especially your mobile devices. Apparently copying and pasting content from Word drags along multiple little whiskers of code that are invisible to techno-dummies like me, but which wreak havoc on the websites–changing formatting, and appearance of how the sentences and paragraphs show up on the page. I am no tech-whiz, but I am a decent writer, and an enthusiastic photographer with a natural eye for frame, and a fabulous, experimental cook. The products of all those talents will grace these pages for all of you to read, and muse on, and even cook for yourselves. There’s a lot more coming in these first weeks. Be patient with me, I’m a slow learner. If you find a glitch place, send me a note so I can fix it. Hold your breath… and take the ride.
More anon.
MC
