The winter then

I recall two months ago in December how excited I was that winter had arrived, so much so that I was out photographing almost daily.  More joyful days those were.  Now, however, like many of my fellow Chicagoans, I cannot wait for this dreadfully cold winter to end and the warmth and green of spring to emerge from such bleakness.  Perhaps slogging through dirty salty snow and painfully icy winds everyday has wore down my zeal and vigor.  Or that it has dawned on me the absurdity of considering mid-twenties Fahrenheit to be relatively warm.  Either way, this madness must soon end.

Of course, no relief may come until a month or so, sometime in March.  In such times of despair, I must look to a former professor’s “words of wisdom for happiness”: (1) Understand your reality; (2) For every problem, there is a solution; (3) Worry only what is in your control.  I suppose then that it is all a matter of perception.  Happiness is what one makes of it.  The reality of the situation is that winter is not ending anytime soon.  It is out of our corporal control.  My own solution, then (that does not involve a bottle of Glenfiddich), is to remember the happier times of this winter, back in December when I would grab a lens and dash out at the first sight of a snowflake.  That was when I realized that I still had a few good images from nearly two months ago today that I never had an opportunity to publish.  It seemed fitting, then, to do so now as a reminder that winter can be fun and exciting.  It all depends on perspective.

All images © K. Dao Photography 2013, all rights reserved.