Snapshots a decade ago

Hawarden is out there over the river. I'm shooting from a South Dakota hilltop over trees as bare-naked as they are today. But the river's warmth sends up a mask that was, I remember, far more beautiful than I could catch in the camera.

Here's the king, although something of a marble through the haze. Dawn is so often the moment to savor, even if no two will ever be the same. If photography is all about light, you can't beat early morning. 

Seeing deer is almost a given. But this morning, a river away, they didn't seem shy, but bewildered, wondering what they were going to do with all that ice gone, the water too deep to wade, too cold to swim to the other side.  

Grandpa Cottonwood's thick wrinkled skin made the world's best back-scratcher for the buffalo. When cottonwoods catch the morning's early light, all those crevices get gorgeously exaggerated by their shadows, but then just about everything looks better at dawn.

Ten years ago, I was learning that even those dawns that didn't take your breath away could do wondrous things. Something about the lines, here, are pleasing, and the one almost red horse smack-dab in the middle. There's no stunning radiance. Nobody will use this for a calendar. But that doesn't mean what the camera remembered doesn't command its own beauty.

This was best of show that morning--that's what I remember thinking. The river's mists grace the silhouettes with a kind of haunting nostalgia. But ten years ago, it's clear I was out hunting for landscapes. 

I could go out there today and do it all over again. Nothing I saw through the lens that day got fussy about me and my camera; even the deer walked along leisurely on the bank across the Big Sioux. Time was no matter. 

But one shot is unlike any others when I scroll through the record, one shot has a wholly different purpose, one shot cheers the soul in whole different way. Nobody will ever put it up on the wall either, but every living soul knows its beauty this time of year. This one:

There's dirt on that crystallized snow--see it? Nothing's perfect here. But there's reason for hope, always reason for hope. There's Easter.