Some Failed Pictures from a snowy day

This morning cotton was falling from the sky and hanging in the trees. It's cold enough here that someone pronounced the word cotton as snow.










I stood in my son's room, trying to take pictures of the trees, their slender arms wreathed in white. Failure. Imagine if Jesus hadn't raised Lazarus or the water had stayed as wine? Out back, a group of trees were decorated in snow, like very tall and graceful women heading out to a formal ball.
















Winter is not cooperating. The flakes float down on a warmish winter day, muffling the cries of engines. On the street, someone is shoveling, running the steel edge of their shovel along the sidewalk. 















What if you and I were to get lost in the snow? Certainly, you say, it wouldn't be so easy. You know these streets so well. I would tell you that I am lost wherever I go, and you would point to a flock of crows in the arms of a tree or the way that our bush looks like a Christmas tree clothed as it is in snow. And I would say, let us talk no more of the snow. I want to tell you again that I am always lost. But you are no longer listening, a car has driven by playing a song that you like, or a couple is dragging their children across the ice on a wagon. "Look at that," you'd say, "such beauty."














Outside, the ice covered sidewalks are insulated by snow. In the white sheathed streets I begin to look for beauty. I begin to think of a cardinal flying on a white plain of snow; I think back to the slip of my foot on the stairs, wondering what it would have been like if my head had cracked open.What thoughts would come tumbling out upon the steps? Nothing of course but bits of grey matter. Why wouldn't all these thoughts come spilling out instead, on multitudes and confusing walks through fields of snow.














The people on the street are props in an uninteresting play. I see fields of white, trees that if only I could shoot from the proper angle, making a frame of the sky that I could turn into something beautiful. And then I see a flock of crows, and a series of trees that remind me that we are surrounded by beauty, like fish swimming in water, we temporarily forget that it's there.
                The bus is arriving soon, but I hear a small tweet from a large tree or bush, I couldn't tell you which because I don't know much about trees or bushes or evergreens or myself. I think how perfect it would be to capture a photo of a small bird's feet wrapped around a slender limb of a tree. Up above me, a small cardinal, startlingly red against the white tweets his aimless challenge at the snow. By the time my phone is out, unlocked and pointing up into the bush or tree or shrub, he is gone. And with that the moments of searching for beauty. I am on the way to the bus now. I have been found. It's coming soon, headlights like eyes to take me back to the land of the living.