Iceland

With temperatures hovering in the twenties, it looks like we're hunkering down for real winter- for a spell.

The frozen landscape makes for a world most surreal, where the sunlight illuminates every object with oblique light. It makes real a world our parents read to us thirty years ago in fantasy books, like the Chronicles of Narnia.







Back to reality: last spring, a local high school lad was killed in a tragic car accident on a sharp curve on a nearby road. For the last several months, everyone who drives past the memorial is reminded daily of a life cut short. We've never understood this macabre custom of making a shrine at the place of death. Note to friends and family: if we ever die on a roadway, please don't memorialize the tradgedy in perpetuity. Leave the flowers at the grave and move on with your lives.

An icy grove of trees shimmer and sway at Peach Mountain.











A leaf hangs suspended in a stiff layer of ice under the University of Michigan public radio tower.














A long spike of ice juts into the dark from a clump of maple leaves.











Drops of water hang suspended in nature's icy beauty, exemplifying the magnificence of the day.