Winter Encore

I always rush things. I say that like it’s a good thing.

At least, I don’t think it’s a bad thing.

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I prefer to think of it as a natural enthusiasm for what’s just around the corner… like spring.*

As a consequence, lately our posts have been about mud puddles, spring flowers, calves, outdoor restaurant patios, and soup.

(Soup is definitely a cross-seasonal topic.)

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But this morning as we were wading through recent photos looking for inspiration for today’s blog post, I found myself not quite ready to let go of winter.

Or at least, I wasn’t ready to slide fully into spring without one last post of a handful of the 10,012 photos we took of snow this year.

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I used to think that winter was a time of no color, but I’ve changed my mind. Without the desaturated foreground of black, white and shades of gray, would I have noticed the delicate, almost mango peachy palette of this sunset?

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Late-season snow has a meringue-like quality that shimmers with pinks and blues and purples rivaling even the most flamboyant of the tiny box houses sprinkled on the hills of San Francisco.

Earlier in winter, it’s dusty like icing sugar.

Do you think it’s an issue that everything looks like food to me?

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You’ll never see the effect of a full moon bouncing off a tin roof like this in summer. It was like looking directly at a partial eclipse. I had Mrs. Brommelly from Grade 2 echoing in my head with warnings of burned retinas and the certainty of going blind. I put my sunglasses on just in case.

Is the midnight night sky that blue in June?

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There… I think I’m done now.

It was this shot of the Snake River that inspired today’s blog. I took it a few weeks ago out of the car window at 65 mph, rolling into Swan Valley from Idaho Falls.

When I saw it this morning, I thought, “Hey, that’s a pretty winter shot. We should do one last post on winter scenes before hanging up the mittens for the year.”

But now it looks like spring to me.


*This was the dock I was absorbed in shooting when Rick saw the swan.