Winter Glade - Missoula, Montana

"Black brooms of trees sweep the sky clean..." - from Snow Dance by Evelyn Scott (1893-1963)

Ethereal Ice Shadows - Missoula, Montana

"She had never known that ice could take on so many shades of blue: sharp lines of indigo like the deepest sea, aquamarine shadows, even the glint of blue-green where the sun struck just so." - Malinda Lo, Huntress

Wishing a beauty-filled new year to you!

Winter Sapling Shadow - Missoula, Montana

"I wear my shadows where they're harder to see, but they follow me everywhere. I guess that should tell me I'm travelling toward light." - Bruce Cockburn, from Birmingham Shadow

Perfect Reading Day - Missoula, Montana

"On gray days, when it's snowing or raining, I think you should be able to call up a judge and take an oath that you'll just read a good book all day, and he'd allow you to stay home." - Bill Watterson, There's Treasure Everywhere

Snow Squared - Missoula, Montana

"A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape." - Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Wagon Days Done - Corvallis, Montana

"...A wagonload of radishes on a summer morning. 

Sprinkles of dew on the crimson-purple balls. 

The farmer on the seat dangles the reins on the rumps of 

dapple-gray horses...

The phantom of an old workhorse taking the steel point of a 

plow across a forty-acre field in spring, hitched to a harrow in 

summer, hitched to a wagon among cornshocks in fall, 

These phantoms come into the talk and wonder of people on 

the front porch of a farmhouse late summer nights..." - Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), from Cornhuskers, 1. Prairie 

Iced Tree Lines - Grant Creek, Missoula, Montana

"One of the reasons there are so many terms for conditions of ice is that the mariners observing it were often trapped in it, and had nothing to do except look at it." - Alec Wilkinson, The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andrée and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration

Christmas Terrarium - Corvallis, Montana

So fitting for Boxing Day: a wee bit o' fairyland 'boxed' up in glass - an enchanting living room reminder of magical viewpoints we can choose.

"There is such a place as fairyland - but only children can find the way to it...Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again; and blessed are they above mortals. They... can bring us tidings from that dear country where we once sojourned... The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland." - L. M. Montgomery (1874-1942), The Story Girl