Something about winter’s subtle beauty always tugs at my heart. There is a beauty present that is otherworldly, and almost invisible, often somehow entirely other from the object being admired. It doesn’t draw attention to itself, and maybe it is the very fact that it doesn’t that makes it so alluring to me.

Delicately-striped fungus on a decaying log. Sunlight filtering through the paper-thin sepals of a dried seed-pod or flower head. Ripples in dunes of snow. A cat’s warm fur when the thermometer is reading about 15 degrees. Sunlight. The sunlight itself is different.Winter is a wonderful time of year. There is a peace, yet an anticipation. There is a rest and a sleep, a slumbering, and yet the cold brings out a quiet energy that everything seems ready to burst into peals of laughter at any moment. There is the warmth, strange warmth, of sunlight on my face, and yet the chattering of my wet-now-frozen hair rattling against itself. There is the frigid cold of face and too-warm warmth of body that comes from overzealous layering. There are the billows of steam when our front door opens, tiny cat prints in the snow, sleeping cats in the cabin, reluctant to go outside. There’s the sparkle of fresh snow, the hush of falling snow, the crunch of snow underfoot. Flowers of frost on windows, glassy lakes, and white-drifted roads.

On beautiful days like today, winter could last forever.