Wishing this was Florida, I got up early today in the already rising light and went out to clear the snow off the car in the driveway.
It was bone-chilling cold because of the wind which also played a positive role by blowing almost everything away so I had very little work to do and had time, before driving my wife to work, to warm up the engine and my aging sinews.
Somehow, it entered my head to drive around the block while waiting.
Everything was silk-smooth, the bushes bent by the accumulation of seeming weightless powder.
All was quiet except for the crunching sound of my tires and as I rounded a corner into the sun, the glare put into stark relief the silhouette of a bare tree, the kind that reaches up more than out.
The angle of the rays made it seem that the whole tree was glittering like a hard jewel, as if the tree itself were a strangely shaped dark crystal, delicate and sparkling in the early morning.
I held my breath as if such fragile beauty would crack with the slightest movement and missed my camera.
Driving right by as the sun shifted across my field of vision the tree showed itself, up close, made of solid, dense and darkened wood and bark, a few patches of ice stuck just in the crannies and the angles where the branches bent.
My wife came out just a I pulled in to my driveway, thankful after all to be out on a regular winter work day in Ottawa.
