Shooting in the Ice Age

Well, all right--let me be a bit sacrilegious. Global warning got you up a tree? Consider another Ice Age. 

Got to be an idiot to go out in weather like this, although, lots farther north, thousands do it to try to pull a squirming walleye out of a hole in a thousand frozen lakes. Make that ten.

I didn't come home with supper. I didn't take a fishing rod and was nowhere near a lake, although once upon a time more than one prairie ancient called this world an ocean. 

I've got more gorgeous pictures of this scrubby thing along a mud road that's not maintained. There's something in the way it stands in the pitch of this broad land that's just plain attractive, I guess. although I'll admit that maybe I'm the only one who sees it. 

The problem with taking pictures out here in the world where I live that there's honestly nothing to shoot. The Black Hills?--sure. The Badlands?--no kidding. But empty northwest Iowa fields freezing in mid-winter?--nobody calls this world beautiful. 

But then, I tell myself, someone certainly does. Someone in upper case. 

I consider it my office to see. It's not particularly hard work, but sometimes, like right now, it's freezing. 

I'll admit it--there's nothing show-stopping in these shots, nothing to make me or anyone else stop in their tracks. 

No matter. I'm here to say that if your can keep your fingers warm--even out here, even mid-winter--there's always something to see, always some joy, even in the cold.

You just got to dress warm, like he does.