Morning Thanks--Minimalist January

Just so you know. What drew me out here wasn't the Luxembourgers' monument. I'd been here before, I already knew what it remembers, and I didn't need to see it or read it. 

For the record, here it is unfrosted. The stone on top quotes I Thessolonians 1: 2-3; the plaque says "In Memory of the Early Settlers" and then May 20, 1970.

What drew me out of the basement was strange January weather--thick fog atop six of inches of the kind of light and airy snow that puts a top hat on everything. Unusual snowfall out here where blizzards are about wind as much as they are about snow. Yesterday was an oddly opaque morning. The sky gave seemed resolute--no sun was going to break through, which meant that what you saw outside isn't much.

What drew me out was a good question: could I catch that nothingness in a camera? Can I find beauty in a drab and colorless world? It's a challenge to someone who lives here 150 years after those early settlers celebrated. In the sod house, January, 1971, they weren't thinking about their DSLRs or a morning ride down still snow-choked roads. There were no roads.

Anyway, what was outside our windows was a look you don't see all that often, a look that begged me to get out.  So, here goes:

The thing about January--low-light, endless fields of snow--is it makes us all minimalists. There's nothing comely about anything here: a few broken stalks from standing after harvest, a couple random roadside weeds, a telephone pole, and undefined land and sky. Nothing comely, but somehow, it speaks. Not loud, just minimal.

You have to remind yourself this isn't black-and-white photography. Just the scent of color runs along the banks of the Floyd here. 

This one cheats a bit. BTW, this isn't hoarfrost. This is what remains of an anomaly--snow that comes straight down and doesn't blow. That never happens--except Sunday night.

This cheats too. The river offers angles and shadows glaore. It tells its own stories, no matter what kind of backdrop it happens to have.

I'm just aiming and framing. The camera does nothing more than repeat, vividly, what I saw. The "fierce artificer," Emerson called it--he meant what he thought of as God--is the Producer/Director; He's the showrunner. What's out here is just what he left us after the storm--a darkened river slowly freezing over as it winds through the garden.

You want Baroque, visit Italy. What I learned on a foggy Monday morning is that even in a darkened, colorless world, something awesome is here, something more than minimally beautiful.

Thanks be to God, who can even make a spreader sing.