Each moment of the year has its own beauty. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

This morning when I began my day it was still night. Not quite. It looked like night, but it was early morning and the sun’s rising time has not yet caught up with my internal wake-up alarm.

The house was also awake. Pipes were humming-moaning-rumbling with flowing water and reminded me of the sounds of a storm which reminded me that there were predictions for a snowstorm today in our area. I peered outside into the almost dark. The remains of the perennial garden — stalks and seed heads — stood in silhouette against the open field beyond out land.

Bare ground, absent of snow from blizzards or ice storms or even ordinary snow storms, looked out of place in the middle weeks of January. The storm which was to have begun in the middle of the night had not yet appeared. I checked the Doppler radar, and smiled as I remembered waiting for weather forecasts on the radio as a teen.

“Five til the hour and five til the half hour” the jingle went, announcing times for the weather forecasts. It seemed an awkward way to give the schedule.

Now there is hardly any wait at all. The computer screen opens to a weather website and a United States map. It shows a eastward moving swath of royal blue the width of the state of Iowa. Royal blue is weather code for “big snow”. The storm is only twenty miles from Madison.

By the time I leave the house, snow is coming down in a blinding fury. By the time I’ve run a couple of errands and picked up extra milk, visibility is poor and the ground is covered with several inches of snow. I take a detour to Owen Park and then to Strickers Pond to take some winter photographs.

I fly to Tucson next week, so this may be my one of my only chances to tromp around in the snow and take pictures of the white stuff. Good thing I keep my extras of my winter outerwear in the car!

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and the owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She’s now admiring the snowstorm from inside her home, and she’s glad she doesn’t have to go back out and drive on the slippery streets.