Praying for sun. Although the winter sun in Upstate New York is cold and bleak, just a few hours of it can help melt huge snow mountains flanking both sides of doorways and driveways. All this snow would be depressing except that it sneaks up on you, falling silently from the sky either in fat fluffy flakes or tiny hard hail-pebbles. Either way it’s a surprisingly beautiful event even without the sun.

There was a mysterious dark disc seated in the middle of the pebbly rooftop at Cornell’s Heating Plant. For me, it immediately became a hardened gloomy sun in a sky dense with snowfall.

Altered Horizons 39