You'll want to click on this to see more of it. It's a postcard-perfect winter landscape, where dark huddled trees are frosted with snow, and the hills are white as far as you can see. And as the backdrop to all of this, the sun is setting, and there's a luminous silver band between the blanket of clouds and the forested horizon.
You're not getting the full effect of the celestial glow, since I'm not a photographer and this was just my camera phone. Your certainly not hearing what I was hearing, which was mostly nothing. No expressway rumble, no radio or television, no insipid endlessly-looping holiday music. The only sounds were the wind and the river.
It's those moments, far from home and far from my electronic cocoon, that stop me dead in my tracks and make me want to write a poem to try to capture the wonder I'm feeling.
Then I realize that I'm freezing, so I snap a picture with my phone and follow the dog back to the house.
