After a rowdy night with some visiting family, I woke up before dawn and put on the same shirt I wore yesterday. I didn’t pack to come out for the night, and that’s what happens when drinks and laughs start piling up in my parents living room. We stayed up late as the snow slowly lofted past the windows.

It’s good to wake before the sun and walk in the virgin snow. Sound hides and evaporates, the stillness breaks for nothing. The dogs can’t even punch through the silence, though they try. They become distant figurines on the plain, flying at low altitudes and checking in with a rush of wind and patterned breath as we cross trajectories, the Doppler Effect defined. I’ll never know what posses dogs in fresh snow, some innate sense of purpose fed by boundless joy. They look like 4 legged coke heads gone to Heaven.

I met up with a friend and we had one of my favorite fishing spots to ourselves. The thuds of snow calving from bows and meeting the earth made me look over my shoulder more than I’d like to admit, as it always sounded like a car door slamming. We were far from the road, and farther in the grips of a chironomid hatch that I soon won’t forget.

Nothing like a Sunday morning.