It has been cold lately. Then why shouldn’t it be? It’s the first of February after all, and in these parts, February is often colder than December or January. This is the time when we most often see interesting changes to the landscape wrought by temperature extremes or dramatic storms.

The other day, I got into my car to drive to the nearest town of commercial significance, to get some groceries, stock up on the larder, find something new and interesting that the cat might eat. He’s picky when it’s cold, and we’d run out of the standbys. All the windows of the car were iced over and I had no scraper. Still, the passenger side had a beautiful pattern that reminded me of icy feathers arrayed along a translucent plane. Colors and forms of things that sifted through were from things in the distance, the crystals permitting only an abstract sense of what those things were. From the composition, I got a sense of the sun coming up behind a tree-lined backdrop. Often, If I’m up early enough, and the sky is clear, I do get to see that but from a different angle. This time, that image was actually the neighbor’s garage door, contrasted by the colors of the house and its roof line to which the structures belonged, but the ice crystals caused me to perceive something else.

As I regarded the scene, it occurred to me how readily we prefer to see things through just such a gauze. Before turning on the car’s engine and heater to clear up my view, I wondered to myself, what might someone else have perceived in such a scene, even while knowing from experience what is actually there. How have you, the reader of this essay, ‘re-presented’ early memories or spruced them up? Over what have you drawn or do you presently draw a crystal curtain?