A sure cure for stress is a weekend trip to a lake up north. Add in a group of wonderful friends and a cabin on a lake and everyone comes away in better spirits. It was ladies weekend on Lake Mary, south of Alexandria. We got out of our cars on Friday night, walked into the cabin and left our stress behind. From then on it was relaxing, laughing, resting, and sharing — it was decompression of the best kind. Throw in a beautiful sunset with the slightest of water ripple near the shore, a sky full of twinkling stars, a deck overlooking the lake with the warmth of the sun on our backs, and wonderful conversation; five friends found it hard to pull ourselves away today to return to the cities and our upcoming Monday.
landscapes
Pasque flowers
Snow last Thursday, followed by 65 degrees and sunshine — it all provided moisture and then warmth for the early blooming wildflowers in Minnesota. Amidst a gravel prairie about 50 miles from the Twin Cities is a place where pasque flowers are abundant. And if your timing is good, the entire prairie is filled with these small diminutive flowers. Only two to five inches tall, they are hard to notice from a distance, but it becomes quite magical when you see an entire hillside covered by these flowers. With the warmth of the spring sun, and the golden colors of the late evening, we spent a wonderful few hours amongst the pasque flowers.
Early spring daybreak
Spring has been fickle here in Minnesota. From cold to snow to rain to warm – we’ve had a bit of everything this week. I’ve already heard the welcome return of the red-winged blackbirds singing, and the lake ice has started to diminish. I was at Lake Johanna yesterday before sunrise. The winter air was crisp and cold at 19 degrees when it hit my face and hands as I got out of the car, but my ears could hear the geese and the ducks that were splashing in the open water near the shoreline, and in the distance a woodpecker’s repetitive hammering was contributing to the song. With all this cacophony the sun was illuminating the eastern sky in pinks and orange. It seems that everything is in anxious anticipation of the season of spring.
Winter lines
Yesterday was a blue-sky winter day with mild temps but a strong wind. With plenty of sunshine I wanted to get out to enjoy the weather before the temperatures plummeted to below zero. A little before sunset I went to one of the area golf courses to get some exercise. As the sun was sinking in the western sky, the shadow lines grew long and longer across the unbroken snow. They seemed to stretch much further than the height of the trees, reaching as far to the east as possible. Winter is the prime season of beautiful, low-in-the-sky light, accentuated even more at daybreak and sunset.
Sometimes it’s the light
The weather was cold yesterday – barely up to zero with a biting north wind of 20+ mph. With those conditions I chose to work inside for the day. I walked past the south window several times, looking at the patterns in the snow as they changed throughout the day. Eventually they called me outside to photograph. The sun is still relatively low in the sky, making for some wonderful lines as it slid through the fence and threw its light on our meager snow. There were bits of leaves and tree debris that danced across the pattern, and a rabbit had made its way across the yard and its footprints slashed through the light and the dark. Sometimes it’s the light that pulls the scene together and tells the story.
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