The Escape!

We had a pretty impressive ice storm in central PA and in a whole bunch of other places along the U.S. eastern seaboard on New Year's Day. It wasn't expected to start until around noon, so my husband and I got out just before that for some exercise.

He jogged on the side roads because the trails in the woods are too slippery. I went up and walked in the local gameland, the Scotia Barrens; it was my first hike of the new year. By the time we returned, a freezing drizzle had started and the front steps were a sheet of ice.

The trail itself was a combo: it was just leaves and mud in many spots, but in other spots, it was uneven ice. A dude went past me on a bicycle with very fat (phat?) tires. Good luck to you, I thought; there were places I could barely stand, let alone ride a bike?!!?!!!! Wow.

There were dark, dancing tree shapes, where some deep, dark magic was afoot. There were messages from the wild rabbits. There was ice on every little vernal pool, but it was not flat; it was round, and textured, and pitted, and shaped like the surface of the moon. 

There were leaves trapped under the ice everywhere I looked, and I delighted in photographing them: the contrast where two seasons collide, autumn and winter. But in this last, little pond, a single leaf had managed to escape. I - having officially retired just yesterday - recognized in it a kindred spirit, and thought: We are BOTH free!!!

The soundtrack song is this one: the Who, with I'm Free.

P.S. Tales from a photo library: an update. I have mentioned that I am working on salvaging the photos from a failed photo library. On this day, I rescued all of the photos from the gap time from March to May, the period after the last back-up I ever made of the library, and imported them into my main photo library on my new personal computer.

I also decided to go into the new Phoenix photo library I just created, export all of the photos in it (which were from January through March) onto a memory stick, and then import them into my main photo library. So I have now reconstructed pretty much all of the critical photos from 2020 in one photo library on my computer. Yay for progress!