It was frosty this morning with an icy blue sky and a pale yellow sun. Perfect for a fleece-clad walk with Baxter. Of course, the hills were lovely, dusted with snow, and the crunch of frozen leaves under foot was a welcome sound after many days of rain. But the most spectacular thing about this morning was something I find difficult to explain. Many a writer has attempted to describe the beauty of a frosty morning, and having grown up in the upper Midwest, I've tried it many times myself. I read once that when you put a picture into words, you lose a part of it. I think that's often true, but I like to think of it in terms of compression -- the writer compresses the picture into words and the reader opens it and recreates the picture in full size in their own mind. I hope you can recreate this picture, because my words are not enough...
As Baxter and I rounded a corner and came out of the woods into a clearing, the low morning sun burst through the trees onto the field of frosty white brush and tall grass. I've often seen ice crystals sparkle in the sun, but this was extraordinary. It looked like the whole field was lit from within by a billion tiny, colored lights in and around every leaf and stem. It sparkled in red and green and blue and purple, twinkling and dancing like the stars on a crisp winter night. It was as if all the stars had been plucked from their places in the sky and sprinkled across this field to shine in the soft light of morning.
Baxter and I stood motionless. Soon the sun would climb higher in the sky and melt the icy morning into day, but for this one extraordinary moment, time seemed to stop.
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