White can be beautiful

 

Not that many days ago I referenced a classic Melanie song while I was talking about Winter:

White can be beautiful, but mostly it's not.

Her comment was in a song about not eating animals, but wisdom is wisdom, n'est ce pas? And I found it a suddenly insightful comment in regards to Winter.

Unlike the wall to wall beauty of Spring or Fall around here, Winter strips the land bare, reveals the dirt of the city, and exposes the thinness of our scant urban wilderness. Or more specifically, it covers everything in a thick, glorious and angelic shimmer of white, and then, in something like an over-speeded time lapse it turns grey and thin and bare and dead and mottled. It is punctured by urine and showered in the residue of the toxic exhaust of a city.

Oh white can be beautiful, but mostly it's not.

But it is snowing now and god it's lovely. 

Housebound, sick for days, all I can do, ALL I can do, is look out the window

and marvel.

This city in the good part of Winter: