Fragile Days, Snowy Nights

So this is Minneapolis, the city where I live.  We've had about two feet of snow dumped on us in the last week; most of it came down on Friday, a few days before this picture was taken.  This is the view I see as I walk back from my second-to-last class of the day on Monday and Wednesday evenings.  Funny, actually—the season is changing, and even within the space of a week, it doesn't get this dark anymore.  So it goes.

I love walking back across the bridge, looking at the city as the lights come on, so I usually walk on the north side of the bridge as I'm on my way home in the evenings; the view on the other side isn't nearly so beautiful.  (During the day, I walk on the south side; it's sunnier.)

This picture wasn't actually taken in 1983, of course.  The colors remind me of the old photo albums we have at home, though, pictures from when I was very small and from before I was born.  I think the world was maybe tinted slightly brown in the eighties—or perhaps just the places my parents took pictures of (the places of which my parents took pictures). 

This is the view from the other side of the Washington Avenue Bridge; it's what I see when I walk to class in the mornings.  You can see a bit of the Shoe Tree there in the corner.  It's funny how much that adds to the composition of the photograph.  It's beautiful to me—but to anyone else, I think, without without the dangling shoes, it's just a cloudy river. This is almost the same shot, but you're smart.  You could have figured that out on your own.  I nixed the colors in this one—look at the beautiful recession of greys.  From the black trees in the front, to the wedge of hilly riverbank (dark grey reflection, the hill itself a shade lighter), to the faded background (there's a highway back there), to the nearly-white sky, and what is either a cloud or a smudge on my computer screen.  Look at this!  I live here; I get to see this every day. I went out of a walk one night as it was snowing.  I asked a few people, but no one wanted to come along—sometimes I wonder why I bother, but I suppose it doesn't hurt to try.  ("No, it's the rejection that stings, haha!")  I enjoy these giant planters—great round cement things, full of dirt.  In the spring and fall (and, I suppose, the summer), they house flowers, but during the winter months they sit empty.  (And by empty, I mean, "with dirt, but without flowers.")  When the snow comes, they're like little round white canvases.  It seems people cannot resist drawing, writing, and sculpting in them.  One of them, last week, had written in the snow the words "insert flowers here."  It made me smile.
This is one of the things that makes snow magical, and the reason I wish someone had come walking with me.

I went out walking by myself that night, without my camera.  This was the shot that made me go back to my room and retrieve camera and batteries.  The shadows on the snowbank...

Look at the snow by the art building!  It's like the Northern Lights, twisting and dancing in the night.  Windy, cold, snowy, beautiful.  I love living in Minnesota.  There's actually a lot I like about this photo—the recession of the brick wall, how crisp the bricks are in the foreground.  The way the light catches the snow and makes it glow in the night; the trees in the back, nearly obscured by the snow-heavy air.  The little patch of brick walkway uncovered by the wind helps ground things too, I think.  Funny how lucky we are, sometimes, to stumble across these beautiful things, and to be able to freeze these moments forever.