March arrives

Saturday morning before 6:30. I'm ruefully awake, looking at the grey light from my bedroom window panes and guiltily thinking that I ought to get out of bed and see the sun rise from the woods. Feeling slightly nauseated from the vertigo that greets me most days, a nasty little reminder of an aging body. The day brings nothing for me to look forward to. I feel no motivation to layer on heavy clothes and pull on my boots to clump off to the river, but I hear that iron inner voice saying "it doesn't matter how you feel about it." So I go.

Head still spinning unpleasantly as I totter down the front steps in the pre-dawn chill. Placing my feet carefully in hard crusted snow, avoiding the icy tire tracks up over the railroad berm, I crunch my way into the woods. The snow no longer fresh, littered with twigs and limbs and shreds of bark, patches of dead frozen undergrowth here and there. And the bone chilling cold. What the hell am I doing out here? It's ten degrees. But I unfold my stool and sit, pull out my sketchbook and pencils. I don't want to draw but I do anyhow.

A woodpecker's staccato tapping somewhere in the trees downriver. The muffled sound of slushy water carrying ice floes, a brown and grey stream moving slowly behind a scrim of black trees. A cold haze forming and beginning to glow with the day's first rays of sun, luminescing in the frigid air. The wild dark tangle of branches and tree trunks in front of me silhouetted against the wooded ridge across the river. I take it in, picking up pencils with stiff fingers.

I'm here because I decided to be here, not because I was in the mood to leave my warm bed on a quiet Saturday morning when I could have slept in. I came not caring or believing that I would feel better, absorbed as I was in my little funk. But pushing my attention out to be in the world beyond my head, to meet this first cold day of March and record the small moment, I find the prospects for the day opening to greet me. And I'm grateful.

dawn along the river, 8-1/4 x 11-1/2, Derwent Inktense pencils, larger image in drawings gallerey