Winter is always with us...

“What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.” 
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Monomonday winter really got me thinking today as we are just past midsummer.  But of course that is the significant thing isn't it?  Winter is always somewhere round a corner ahead of us and we appreciate all that the seasons bring us when we constantly move from one to another.

Life's like that.  Always something else around the corner.  The sweetness is in the contrast and so you have an image of the contrast that life offers us in the awareness of our own mortality and that of others.

Keats had it absolutely right in "Ode to Autumn" which turns into a poem about the whole of life:

"Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
 
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
 
While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day
 
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
 
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
 
Among the river-sallows, borne aloft
 
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
 
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
 
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
 
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies."

The extra shot shows an amazing gravestone in the catacombs section of a very old cemetery, Keyhill, in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham.