There is snow, two or three inches underfoot, from a storm yesterday, and this morning it is exceptionally cold, even under the blazing sunshine of a cloudless sky. And the river, once again, like glass. A glowing shape catches my eye. Milky white on the surface of black ice, a cluster of dried weeds fast frozen into the shape of a star.

After I walk, I'm still wondering about why I took this picture – what it stirs in me. The word that springs to my consciousness is galaxy, so that's where I let it take me. And I look up galaxy and here is this NASA picture on Wikipedia which seems to mirror my ice sculpture.

Maybe this connects to my pictures and writing from yesterday. I was so stirred by the picture post card of my very place on the river - taken over a century ago. I wonder who stood there in 1905 in the prickles and brambles I know so well? She or he must have cared in the way I care about this view, this view of the Charles that has changed so little in all these years. Seeing the post card picture next to my own fresh made picture made me feel, paradoxically, part of something infinitely larger and infinitesimally smaller all at the same time. Like the way Rebecca feels in Our Town, when she tells her brother about the letter Jane Crofut got from her minister:

All photos and text copyright Kelly DuMar 2017 unless otherwise attributed