Temporarily dormant

Waiting for spring
London, ON
February 2013
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The scene: a bitterly cold, snow-covered playground on a windswept plain beside London's Thames River. We had come to Gibbons Park because our original plan, bowling, had been scotched by a lineup that stretched out the door.

The kids had been asking to come here for ages. Never mind how ridiculous it might have seemed to clamber over frozen play structures that had no business being here in the middle of winter. Never mind my need to stand by the sidelines and slowly freeze my extremities while the munchkins played their hearts out. Just listening to them warmed my soul.

I took as many pictures of them as I dared before a) they told me to quit it and b) my fingers turned blue and required a hasty return to the warm insides of my cushy mittens. And when my fingers warmed up and I was ready to shoot again, I found a stand of youngish trees nestled into the bottom of the nearby hillside that had, up until now, failed to cut the winds down to size. But as I took in the geometry of the branches, I knew the scene deserved to be captured. You don't always need a reason, of course. You just know.

This was a "before" picture. On this afternoon, my wife was in Montreal, spending her days in a hospital waiting room with her dad and sister, helping her mom in any way she could. I was home trying to keep life as normal as possible for our family. And spending a lot of quiet time wondering why life sometimes has to play out as it does.

As soon as I shot this picture, I realized why. It was the background colors that did it for me, muted as they were against the seemingly barren tree branches. On the surface, it looked dead, empty, beyond redemption. But deeper down, those colors suggested a brighter future, when the winds would stop, the sun would return and the temperatures would once again rise. When leaves would grow, seemingly from nothing, and the muted colors in the background would explode with life.

The realization couldn't change the forces that were already reshaping my family's future. But it made me look at the context of things a little bit differently. And if this otherwise unremarkable stand of trees didn't give me hope, it at least made me feel a little warmer on an otherwise bitterly cold afternoon.