A long way to spring

Not quite home

Every week, Tess Kincaid on The Mag gives us a visual prompt to start our creative minds churning on a poem or snippet of a story. This week it was a car on a lonely wet road in the middle of the country. Some weeks the image Tess chooses is an immediate jump start and others I download it and promise to think about it. On rare occasion nothing relates and I just enjoy reading the poems of others.

This week what the prompt brought forth for me was how alien that wet country road seemed. And how wistfully I returned to look at it. Such a contrast to the world outside my window this week. And so instead of a poem or a word story I give you a photographic essay beginning with my snowbound equivalent of her wet country road.

A moment of clarity in storm of blowing snow

My front windows look out on the hill across the rural county road and my assessment of the weather and the roads is often based on the view: Shirley's car parked at the bottom of her long drive; her foot prints visible or not in the snow drifts she must trudge to get into her warm home; the bend of the Ponderosa Pines on the top of the hill; the height of the now drift at their feet; blue sky visible or not

There is a pond beside the road

If I decide to venture out there are places I must go. I always take the camera. There is a road that passes by a pond just beyond these trees. The hope is to stay on the road but it too is covered with snow and the wind whips the snow and obscures the view. I quickly decided it was a manual focus sort of day. And longed for the fire in the wood stove at home.

Illusion?

The snow has been so opaque at times this series of storms that the lens and sensors in my digital camera want to focus on the snow and not the illusion of trees behind the smothering fall of flakes.

A tree stand alone

The snow driven by a restless wind erases the forest and the mountains and the sky. A solitary tree stands alone having gone unnoticed against its previous background.

I wait for the end of winter. I long for wet roads and not icy ones. I even think longingly about mud and flood season. But if you do not get lost or freeze or stuck or drive over the pond instead of the road it is beautiful to behold. But please give me just one day of blue skies and still air between storms.