Springing

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: They are very early birds, indeed, who write to me when the ground is, not merely frozen, but buried under more than three feet of packed snow and ice in order to ask, might I please start photographing spring. Often they write on Groundhog's Day. It is not the southerners, blood thinned by tropical winters, who write. Some of them welcome reminders of New England winters. Rather, it is northerners, bred and conditioned to a robust tolerance of the cold, who squeal early about the chill. Under normal circumstances they'd have no spring worm from me, but they have my sympathies, and, as I've been drawing images from past seasons for awhile, there's no harm in offering this image of a first lily reaching up from pond bottom in cool spring waters.

...but be careful, you chilly birds, what you wish for...