Summer is tempestuous in her glories. Autumn is flashy. Spring is shy, a bit timid. Winter is secretive and inscrutable. I can’t say that I have a favorite season, and thus, I cannot say that I have a season I dislike. Each stage in the cycle is beautiful, glorious, tempestuous, and shy in its own right and in its own distinct way. Though a calendar may dispute what I say, Winter has settled firmly upon the Midwestern USA; we have a number of days until any calendar might declare the advent of the season. But my eyes, my skin, and the thickness of my coat says that Winter is here. I can feel the breath of Grandfather Frost—Ded Moroz as I’ve learned to call him, at a time when old, fat men with white hair wear red and shimmy down chimneys. I prefer Ded Moroz to that other, jolly guy. He’s far more…interesting. I thought of Ded Moroz today. I worked. Oustide. Temperatures were seasonably low. The wind was bitter and biting. There was snow. There was salt on every road, sidewalk, and driveway. It was an uncomfortable day, spent largely in a truck with exquisitely poor heating. It ended well enough, and upon my return home, I found myself in the mood to consume mass quantities of Dr. Pepper. There was no such beverage in the refrigerator, and so I had to go outside, down the street, and into a store owned by two brothers and a nephew who speak to one another in Arabic. They tinge their English-language speech with African-American slang. Their urban articulation is flawless: to hear them speaking of a woman and her baby-daddy is to hear an African-American neighborhood local discussing the complex social identity of the oddest of creatures: the baby-daddy. I was not interested in the everyday life of one woman’s baby-daddy, and so I didn’t listen to the oddly comical soap-opera tale bouncing across the front counter. I was interested in junk food and junk drink: Dr. Pepper and microwave popcorn. I was interested in returning home, listening to the soundtrack to Avatar and curling up with a good book. Baby-daddies were far from the forefront of my mind. Upon my return home, I noticed ice, and a dusting of snow. That’s not impossible when Grandfather Frost decides to trim his whiskers and leave snowflakes all over the place like stray hairs in a sink basin. The snowflakes were prefect, hexagonal intricacies: impossible to capture with a camera. The ice, hanging in crystalline suspension from the lips of awnings was far more interesting. I couldn’t resist a shot of such ice, and so I nabbed a dozen. As I write this, I’m warmer than before. I’m still recovering from the day’s chill, and I’ve captured something that marks one of the beauties of winter. It’s a thing I remember when temperatures climb into sweltering double digits…when sidewalks become hot enough to fry eggs. Such days are a long way off, and there’s no guarantee that I’ll even be in Chicago once such temperatures return, but I’m here now. And there is snow. There is ice…and for as uncomfortably cold as this day has been, there was also beauty of a sort that’ll be long gone by summer. This image is a testament to that beauty, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed capturing it. As always, I hope you’re having a great week, and I look forward to catching up on commenting as it seems that I have at least two days off this week. The lost income is a bit of a downer, but at least I’ll get to sleep in, and do fun digital things.