A gloomy game of mud and leaves

There was so much mist over the Arlington Res, I couldn't see the other side as I walked to Trader Joe's. Past ten or fifteen feet, the color of the ice faded into the color of the sky: all the same soft monochrome distance, and the trees along the dyke looked as flatly drawn as a medieval illumination, scratched off into perspectiveless air. The snow underfoot was patched with sodden grey ice that slushed with each step. But near the shore, where the snowmelt had flooded up over the solid ice, the water had turned a milky peridot green, like rainwater absinthe, that paled into duck's egg blue near the spillway and steeped-tea rust around the rocks, unexpectedly chromatic as mineral pools. There's a weird vividness of color on rainy winter or autumn days that I have trouble describing—the wet heaps of dead leaves are caramel-colored, dull russet, red as squirrels, and they should be only dead brown. The lichen stands out on the rain-blackened trees and the scars on the birches look like photonegatives. The overcast is colorless and everything glows. If I were a painter, days like this could send me out of my mind. By now, of course, it's all blue dusk, underwater and windy. I will be sorry when spring comes.

This afternoon, I used "The Cherry Tree Carol" to settle a theological argument. Every now and then, my life really pleases me.