Winter, in all its monochrome glory, is now firmly entrenched in my backyard.  Since my current view is something like the image to the left, I find myself longing for a bit of color.

What?  There’s color in that there picture?  Well of course there is!  It’s just that it’s the color cast upon an ocean of snow by a setting sun, and it’s mostly blue.  And white.  And some sort of odd mixture of the two.  It’s monochrome.  And while it’s beautiful in its own way, it’s also boring.

I want color!  Color that pops off the page, or better yet, color that pops out of the dreary winter landscape.  I want color that makes my eyes sing and my heart soar, color that is so deep and rich and vibrant that it’s practically alive.

I’ve been trying to organize the scads of pictures that live on my computer and in so doing, I ran across these pretty, pretty pictures that I took last summer: