This morning we woke up to blue skies in Chic and Trendy Dunstable and, after dropping Self-Proclaimed Perfect Boy Gabe off at school, I was very excited.

Because I remembered to grab my camera and, instead of going straight home, I was headed to a few places I knew in town to grab some pics for you.

Yes you!

I pulled out of the high school parking lot and my eyes fell on the pristine whites of the snow.

As I drove down the street, still snow-covered without a hint of blacktop, I saw the light filtering through the snow-covered trees.

Excellent.

Everything was perfect.

I slowed down a bit, flipping my blinker on, and the school bus in front of me rumbled on down the road.

I turned right onto the little road that leads to the Christmas tree farm.

The light, the snow, the quiet.

A curve in the road ahead.

Perfect.

I cruised to a stop and put the car into park.

Grabbed my camera.

Flipped it ‘on’.

Found the setting I wanted.

Ready, set….

n-o  c-a-r-d

Seriously?

I double checked.

Triple checked.

No.

Flucking.

Card.

Sigh.

Tried a few pics with my phone.

Good, but not what I wanted this morning.

Heavier sigh.

Back in car.

Drove home and, to taunt me, every single freakin’ thing looked absolutely spectacular.

Favorite old farmhouse bathed in morning light?

Check.

Mr. McGovern’s farm looking like a bovine Heaven?

Check.

Thought up the word, ‘bovinity’ at that point, tried to remember to use it later. Forgot.

Road curving through the snow in New England Winter perfection?

Fluuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuk!

But then I realized that it still looked great, and the sun was still really low in the sky, when I turned into the driveway.

It was like hitting the fast forward button on the remote.

I leapt out of the car and walked super fast to the garage door and opened it and walked super fast to my computer and turned it on and and and and and and and and and it was finally on and I ejected the stoopid card and walked super fast back to my car and got in and it was too late to head back to the road I was going to take pictures on but that was okay I’ll do that tomorrow so maybe I’d go left out of the driveway good plan!

First stop.

Cows.

Cool right?

And, no Number 389 at the top of this post is not just a zoomed in version of this pic. Check the mouth. Number 389 at the top is chewing the other way.

I just loved taking photos of Number 389 is all.

Okay, another cow:

She was shy about showing me her number.  Maybe she has number 354, butt (get it?) we’ll never know.

And these are cow paths and tracks through the new snow that was gifted to us the other day:

Okay, now over to French Street because there is a farm there that offers good morning pics.

Oh! Here it is:

Cool pasture. I like it.

And this is French Street itself, which goes right through the middle of an old farm.

Over the course of an hour, the roads were beginning to show their pavement.  Very exhibitionist-y, I think.

And then the sun was getting high and I was losing the really good light, but as I drove past the very end of the farm, just in front of the farmhouse itself, I looked up and many eyes looked back down at me.

I played with these a bit, and just loved them.

Birds.

Cool right?

They reminded me of something.

In a movie I watched recently, called Words and Pictures, Clive Owen plays an English teacher. In one scene he quotes Updike. And I didn’t know the passage he chose, but it was so amazing that I looked it up later.

It’s from On the Farm.  

I even found the page of the book on books.google.com.

And as I stood out in the middle of French Street this morning, pastures to my left, with their old farmhouse and more land rolling off to my right, Updike’s words – many of which had graduated to images – ambled through my brain.

“Richard was walking up the road with a hat. It was a hat belonging not to my father but to my mother, a wide coolie hat of plaited straw secured beneath the chin by a ribbon reinforced with butcher’s chord. They laughed, Richard and Peggy, when I put it on. My fools costume was complete. We went across the road to the stubbly field and I let him climb into the tractor saddle and showed him, ignition off, how the peddles and levers worked. He looked like a king solemnly enthroned against the nimbose sky and appeared satisfied. The lesson over, he went to the garden patch and joined his mother. He punched her in the stomach, and I watched them pretend to box. Above them, on a single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence.”

Whoa.

Okay, I was looking at two wires, not one.  And maybe they weren’t neat.

But, man.

Those were some sentences.

Thanks for readin’.

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