Oh, the coldness.

After a morning and early afternoon impulsively spent cleaning up my kitchen (who knew it could be this way?), I set out again to take pictures of my county. I was chiefly heading to take a picture of this corpse--which I thought was a squirrel's but now recognize (with some help from my friends) as a groundhog's. But I grew too absorbed in trying to create sequences of going-by barns, and when I pushed the shutter release with the camera aimed at this skin, the whole world grew stubborn. (Meaning, of course, that my thirty-six exposures were gone.)

Fortunately, I had heeded my own advice and carried both cameras with me on this outing. And so--after yet another fellow motorist stopped to ask whether I needed assistance, and then, upon learning that I was taking pictures, engaging me in conversation about photography and dead animals, before saying, "Well, I suppose I'd better let you get to it"--I got to it, with the digital camera, which I'd have pulled out anyway, just to be able to show you what I saw. That picture speaks a lot of what things feel like in mid-Ohio right now. And these, of a farm I pass and a road I take on the way to the grocery store (say, on a night when it's starting to snow and I realize that it would be a good thing to have food in the house after all these weeks) speak of some of the rest.


The very blueness of cold, for instance, if not also the burn.