Figure 2 – Assabet River Wildlife Refuge. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

I thought today that I would share an image that I took last month at the Assabet River Wildlife Refuge.  January in New England is not as amusing as it was when I was a graduate student years ago in upstate New York. We had friends over last night for dinner, and right now my hands are burning from washing dishes.  January’s jaws are gnawing away at us. Still and all, there is a special long-shadowed quality to early winter light and an intense cobalt color to the sky and sky reflected in water.  Even now I have noticed the lengthening of the days, and one has the sense that there is a certain triumph to be felt at conquering winter.

In the end, the planet continues to rotate and revolve.  My undergraduate physics professors would remind me of precession and nutation.  These are the ever insistent motions to which biological life must adapt – and adapt it does, We may truly marvel that life endures against the northern cold, but it does.  Indeed, in its search for evolutionary niches life seeks the cold out.  If you stand still, sniff the air, listen and watch carefully you begin to realize that this is not a dead and frozen world, but one filled with living things.