Being Ready Part Dux

What were you doing this morning? Were you tucked all snug in your bed with visions of sugar plums dancing in your head? Were you lingering over a second cuppa and wondering if working for a living wasn’t a contradiction in terms? Were you struggling with the kids to get them in the car and out the door sometime before the Next Coming?

Relax, we got a snow day. That’s right the schools are probably closed, the Big Guy isn’t going in to work and the second cuppa might be just a starting point. So are you going to spend your day baking cookies, (Listening to the screams of little children as they destroy the house in a severe reaction to cabin fever, trying to control the dog as the kids zip back and forth down the hall playing Starship Enterprise, or waiting on the Big Guy hand and foot) or will you grab a camera and head out into the snow?

Yes, I know using a camera runs counter to all of your artistic aesthetic, snapshots come from cameras, blurry pictures of the Grand Canyon come from a cameras, television comes from a camera, can you sink any lower than that?

Yes, if you pass up the chance to lay in a store of genuine New England, snow draped trees and frosted roadways, snow forts and fights and cathedral like spires of snow sculptures left over night as a gift from Winter.

Snow doesn’t often fall on Coos Bay, now I am a foreigner and have only been here since ’06 but in that time there have been just three days of snow. That’s a ton more than we used to get in Dallas and people here don’t lose their minds when the first flake hits, still it isn’t all that common and if you snooze you lose.

The South Coast is a never-ending canvas of wonders, blindingly beautiful sunsets, hello sun sets in the west, and landscapes you can actually see that haven’t been subdivided into postage stamp lots, colors from the cliffs to the wilds and forests, game of all kinds and fish in a real stream and not on ice, but snow, that’s pretty rare.

So what are you going to do about it? Turn up your nose and swear that people who paint from photographs should be soaked in hypo and buried with a stake of holly in their hearts, sorry wrong seasonal story, or are you wrapping up, no mittens you have to be able to reach the controls, and braving the frost to get a stock of snow pictures for the long, dark months ahead?

I did and I think I might just have found my Christmas card…


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