Ode to Winter

My morning commute is with the sunrise, and evening with the sunset. There's two ways to picture winter: a pain-in-the-ass season of slogging through the rain on my bike, wet and cold - a blur of short, gray days and cold nights. Or, I can feel the acute cold on my fingertips, the icy rain stinging my face, and the grateful clarity of the rare day without rain - hot pinks sunrises and sunsets. Everything is intensified. This external experience brings a new freshness to my writing, too. With the short days the outside world shrinks, and the space for quiet reflection and creating stories swells. And that's pretty lovely.