Sunday, January 08, 2006

shades of gray

A walk downtown this morning reminds me what month we’re in. Oftentimes, Madison has brilliant winters. But there are weeks like this one, where it’s not exactly cold but it may as well be. The snow melted under the violent rainstorm last week. The skies refuse to clear for more than an hour or two. It just seems bleak out there.

Walking along Lake Monona, I’m thinking that there is a reason why people from Iceland feel comfortable here.


Jan 06 044

I swear, I have not tampered with color in these two shots: the camera was set on normal mode. The sun is coming through, but just barely, in small bands of faint yellow against a gray everything else.

In some spots, water is seeping to the surface. Maybe from a current or stream, maybe from a pipe. Somehow this is reassuring. In another couple of months we’ll see water on the entire lake again.

Wont we?



Jan 06 046

6 comments:

kat said...

i know how that lake feels.

gorgeous.

Oscar Madison said...

Those are incredible colors. I mean, great -- I do believe they're real.

Joan said...

Bleak is the new beautiful.

The palette of the 2nd photo makes it look like it's black-and-white. It really is extraordinary that no, it's "in color."

I like being able to visit winter this way.

me said...

This winter has been very odd weatherwise. We are in this pseudo-warm, yet bleak phase. My cats went outside yesterday and they didn't know what to think of it all. There was grass again, yet it wasn't quite spring.

The benefits of global warming.

nina said...

kat: my own feeling is that if the bleakness does not lift soon then I will start refusing to get out of bed.

oscar: they are indeed. you, of course, are sharing these slaty gray days here. It's prettier in photos than in reality.

Joan: Bleak is the new beautiful for people who live in Arizona.

me: part of me is liking the absence of the WI deep freeze. It's horrible when you start liking something that is ultimately going to destroy civilization as we know it.

Laslo said...

Those two pictures are great. They look . . . cold. Here in Kansas City we have been having near-record highs. Yesterday I was sorely tempted to lay on my back on the front lawn and loll in the oblique (but warm) sunlight.