renewed vision

I just walked home in the fresh darkness of an animation-perfect snowstorm, the kind that confidently layers itself on your coat and hat in a no-nonsense way and swirls beautifully in the lights. Iceland's definitely figured out how to do outdoor illumination thanks to the almost constant use in the winter, so the familiar places looked strange and different under this snow-glow and mysterious lighting. I took pictures along the way, enjoying the stuttered look of the snow that my camera captured, the vertical columns of snow in the recessed ground lights near Tjörnin, the striped effect where the underground hot water pipes had warmed the sidewalk enough to melt the coating in places, and the way this short city can manage to appear imposingly majestic as it hangs on to this windswept rock in spite of the weather that roars around it constantly.

It sometimes takes a while to fall back in the rhythm of appreciating winter but I'm finding my pace. I grew up with snowstorms but I still fall in love with them all over again whenever I see it for the first time each season. I know it's not always going to be postcard-elegant snow that falls mostly vertically (since precipitation is rarely vertical here) but right now, right here, I'm loving it.