Back in my daily newspaper days we were asked at the end of the year to choose a favorite image we had made over the past year. Each of us would weigh the circumstances and possible challenges surrounding each of the images as we made our choices. This was especially true if you took the assignment to heart, and most of us did. Nowadays I’m under no such restrictions, and for the fifth year in a row I’ve been determined to choose my favorite 12 … a dozen among the several hundred images stored in my files from my year in the natural world.

It began by brainstorming, if you will. My initial collection featured some 84 different images which may be cause for laughter among my photojournalistic comrades. Whatever!

Although none made the final cut, there were images from five different Northern Light displays although I had slept through at least two displays and was clouded out on a couple of others. Accumulative, there were at least nine different Northern Lights displays through the year including two each in April, November and now December.  

Which is part of the fun of the exercise. Interestingly, my accumulation of deer images for the year was down significantly. No such issues with birds. Among the many images were birds I hadn’t photographed before, including a Western Meadowlark, White-faced Ibises, Indigo Buntings, Starlings, American Avocets, Catbirds and Bluebirds, to name a few. It seemed that every trip to a different state park would garner images of Catbirds, Yellow and Yellow Rumped Warblers. There were photographs from numerous trips to capture Sandhill Cranes throughout the year, most notably a special photographic expedition at Crane Trust in Central Nebraska for the annual spring migration with nature photographer, Cheryl Oppermann. We also made two trips to the Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge for both Cranes and Swans. 

Wildflowers came through once again as I seem to follow their numerous flora seasons beginning with Pasque Flowers in March. We didn’t make a bog trip this past year, though, although autumn tree and sumac opportunities were both numerous and thoroughly appreciated.

And, you can’t live within the Horizontal Grandeur without capturing big sky images, especially those that capture the ambient light created by both sunrises and sunsets. Monet would be a happy prairie painter!

Several camping trips were made to different Minnesota State Parks along with a two week trip to Iceland and Norway, where every day seemed to offer an array of different waterfalls.

It was a blessed year, and a lot of “tough” decisions were made here on a snowy, gloomy wintry afternoon. My last 30 images were incredibly difficult to pare but I eventually made it down to 24. The last 16 took a long stretch of time. So many choices! A reflective image at Lac qui Parle State Park was very hard to eliminate, along with a nice broadside flight of a Bald Eagle. Some of the images fell into my “photographic poetry” realm, meaning that the feel and texture offered an “impressionistic” mood thanks to the beauty of nature. 

So, here you go (my 12 along with bonus images from Norway and Nebraska. All the rest were made in the prairies and woodlands within a day’s drive from Listening Stones Farm!): 

And now, for my bonus images:

We awoke to a visual treasure replete with magical wonder and science, of myth and beauty, that came for a brief visit. Too brief, if I must say so myself. Please excuse my personal thoughts of labeling this winer wonderland of near perfect whiteness as a “feather frost” while most label it as a hoarfrost. Some equate this crystalline and near immaculate beauty of an early morning visit with that of Northern Lights. Who am I to argue, for both are magical and fleeting moments of wonder and joy.

Certainly all this magic is backed by science, so perhaps we should get that out of the way. Technically these frosty conditions are created when water vapor condenses on solid surfaces that are below freezing, such as our bluestem prairie, stems of dormant faded flowers, stark tree branches of winter, and, well, nearly all solid surfaces. Science call this process a sublimation, created when warm moisture in the air starts condensing around frozen nuclei — a prairie or woodland, for instance. Once this process begins, the moisture in the air goes directly from a gas to a solid. In this case, when ice crystals form on various frozen features. All of which is dependent on calm air for these formations of complex, lacy deposits.

Our “vapor” here in the prairie is usually caused by fog coming in, as portrayed by poet Carl Sandburg, on “little cat feet.” Obviously we are nowhere close to Sandburg’s harbor and cityscape where his haunched fog silently and briefly settled before moving on, but the same phenomenon happens here in the prairie, too. His tribute to the beauty of fog might have happened before Sandburg settled to the woods of Vermont, although surely he experienced hoarfrosts outside of Burlington. This time the fog snuck in around here during the early morning hours, although it may happen at other times of the day. Such conditions are more typical on clear and cold winter nights.

Our wonderland of perfectly white frost feathers was so heavy the stems of big bluestem were weighted over to nearly kiss to the ground. Our trees glistened even with the sun being hidden by the dense blanket of fog. Popping through the glistening frosty whiteness were clumps of reddish crabapples to dapple hints of color to an otherwise frosted landscape. We were surrounded by an awe-inspired winter wonderland. 

One might wonder if such beauty has a mythical history. Certainly, for since we were children we’ve heard of Jack Frost. Beyond the science and artistic beauty, feathery hoarfrosts are thick with legend. The term itself is from old English that suggests the feathery ice crystals offer an appearance of “oldness”, of long strands of white hair and beards of elderly geezers. 

There is some thought that the legend of Jack Frost originated from Viking folklore, that his modern name is an Anglicized rendition of Jokul Frosti, or “Icicle Frost,” son of the Nordic wind god Kari. Jokul was a nymph-like creature who painted beautiful frosty patterns on windows during the night and was a personification of the chill that arrived with winter and nipped the noses of children with his icy bite.

Scandinavian mythology paints a picture of a frost giant that brought not only bitter cold but the black doom of winter that symbolized the end of the world. In northern Russia and Finland, an almighty deity known as “Frostman” commanded the weather, and was given sacrifices by reindeer herders to persuade him to lessen the severity of blizzards. The villagers would leave bowls of porridge for the Frostman to ensure their crops weren’t touched by the damaging frost. Elsewhere in Japanese folklore, Frostman was a malicious character, the brother of Mistman, who were both keepers of the frost and dew. 

Jack Frost is well known but barely understood in modern culture. Most people envisage the elfish creature that decorates the night with beautiful silver patterns that melt with the sunrise, and in old England “Jack” was a name or term given to jokers. Over time, he has shed the fearsome demeanor that came with the frost giants of Norse mythology. Something as beautiful as sweeping hoarfrost or delicate ice crystals surely couldn’t have been summoned by a menacing omen of everlasting winter. 

Much like Northern Lights, hoarfrosts are typically fleeting. A brief breeze will cause the frost to flake and scatter like falling snow. In the sunlight this takes on a wholly different beauty as those airborne “diamonds and pearls” Hannah Flagg Gould described in her poem, “The Frost” in the 1800s come to life. It’s all very magical, even those rare “wonderland” moments that somehow escape to last most of a day. However long one might last, they are still magical in their innocent beauty.

While I don’t recall having feathery frosts as a child growing up in Northeast Missouri, I’m sure we had them. We surely have them here in Minnesota, and they rarely shrink from wonderland status. One January day during one of the most snowy winters since moving to Minnesota some 40 years ago, I drove through the hill and valleys around here taking images of snow and frost, capturing pheasants and wild turkeys deep within the elements. A gray mist of fog hung around, and the few fences that remain and the abandoned groves of past dreams were all coated with the feathery finery. Shawls of splendidness. What a lovely and unexpected day.

Usually, though, hoarfrosts have become special memories by mid-morning. It was again this week. Yet I find it fun to wander about with a camera just like I do come nightfall and a chance to record the solar waves of an Aurora Borealis. Perhaps it’s just me for I just love the mysteries of our natural world, of the peacefulness nature offers in the face of so much worldly man-caused greed and turmoil. Sometimes you just need an unexpected flight of Canada Geese to fly overhead on a cold, rainy winter afternoon, a stunning display of Northern Lights, or to awake on a morning to a vista painted in feathery whiteness.

A lone leaf, a last leaf of a summer past, broke free from its tree in an oak savanna choked with a jungle of strong and darkened naked limbs. Halloween trees, as called by my partner, Roberta. Rather than drifting downward, gravity seemed to be drawn from the heavens. The leaf twirled ever higher, a flight not unlike a butterfly, somehow missing the nearby limbs, drifting both higher and laterally. Freely. As the drift crossed a plain created by the forest of oaken limbs, the leaf rose one last time before drifting slowly toward an anonymity of a leaf-strewn forest carpet.

A forestall moment on a late, November afternoon as light softened toward a sleepy haze — a haziness emerging to ever slowly capture the otherwise starkness of the savanna. This was a rare afternoon with barely a breeze in a month that had come in so cold and blustery, blowing, as Aldo Leopold observed in his rather poetic observations, as a wind that describes November. “The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playing swirls, and the wind hurries on …  a tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind.”

Leopold’s wind came early in our November, a somewhat schizophrenic month with afternoons of soul-warming, glorious sunlight mixed with dreary days of gray gloominess. Then the wind. Emily Dickinson wrote that “November always seems to me the Norway of the year.” Dickinson, a introverted loner who rarely left her room, let alone her house outside of Boston, penned the phrase in a letter to her friend, Elizabeth Holland, with this description of November: “The noons are more laconic and the sunsets sterner, and Gibraltar lights make the village foreign.”

Yes, November can be a laconic time following those glorious days of October’s warmth of vivid colors that are suddenly long gone, perhaps signified by a lone wayward leaf joining a dulled leafy carpet. There were days, too, when the trees fought to argue. Days when there was no detaining the wind. Yet, there was color even on the darkest of those days, and enough light to warm the soul just when it seemed the dour gloom of grayness would smother over you like a blanket. Who am I to complain? 

We made a few forays into nature, as is our custom, including a delightful sunny afternoon drive through Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge, where we found two large pockets of sandhill cranes and enough swans to make magical moments seem like a living poem. Such moments feed the soul. November moments, a splinter of time between the colors of autumn and the blessing of light we celebrate come the Solstice.

Yes, November serves as a transition, a prelude to winter that seems equivalent of a spring March as seasons seem to wrestle one another before autumn recedes on one hand, and winter relinquishes on the other. And we are simply on the sideline, observers of a grand plan of which we have little say. 

On those rare years when the joy of October is crushed by a sudden unseasonable snow, the lack of transition seems to hit like a heavyweight’s punch to the gut. Gut punches aside, the transitions ease forever onward. Our grasp for the warmth and color in November is not unlike our wish for warmth and color come March following  a long cold and snowy winter. In my mind these are the reasons for these annual transitions, a slow sliding into winter on one hand, and a quick exit from winter come spring on the other. 

I’m somewhat surprised by the strength of color and light here in the western reaches of Minnesota, although after all these years I perhaps shouldn’t be. Both seem to argue against those otherwise drab and somewhat dreary days by offering a poetic charm to the prairie. An unexpected warmth has mostly kept the waters from freezing, reflecting color and light like prized jewelry or a queenly shawl. Finding such joys helps make this somewhat “foreign” ecosystem seem like home.

Home? On these days of November? This prairie wasn’t part of my grand scheme. I barely realized it existed in my youth, or even as I aged into the “autumn” of my life. Using this as a metaphor, one might suggest I’m entering into the November of my life. In my “September” years we moved to what we learned was the “black desert” of prairie to run a small country weekly. Our initial plan was to give it a few years, yet some 20 years later we were  settled in. We had discovered a vibrant artist community that seemed to dwarf the flatness and lack of trees we were so used to while living along the Little Vermillion and Mississippi Rivers at our former home. Through our new found friendships we discovered the prairie rivers, the riverine environments along with an appreciation of what the late essayist Bill Holm referred to as the “horizontal grandeur.” 

We would plant a native flora garden in our backyard, and I began photographing the blossoms. Yes, it was planted on a cold November day, a planting session that was averted by a bone chilling rain mixed with snow. Years later, after my wife died, I remarried and settled here in this last semblance of the prairie pothole biome in the “Minnesota Bump.” We bought this little patch of land and named it Listening Stones Farm both in honor of its glacial history and our love of Sigrid Olson’s writing. We converted the tillable land to prairie grasses and flora and made paths through both the prairie and woodland for both observation and photography. 

Then the deeper discoveries began; of small pockets of both native and restored prairies along with the few remaining wetlands. With that came the observations of color and light, especially the nuances of ambient light that often paints this horizontal grandeur with pastels that would have made Monet jealous. Before long a place I had no idea even existed either in my youth and early adulthood had become home. 

It is said to appreciate the prairie you must look beyond and within the grasses to discover the inner beauty along with the appreciation of color and light; in the noticing of the magical moments such as a last leaf drifting aimlessly through an oak savanna. November sometimes forces you to see beyond those waving grasses, to be encouraged by both color and light and to develop an appreciation of the natural world around you, in bringing joy to the soul. I’d call that being blessed.