A hard freeze

Jack Frost can't wipe the smile off a garden Buddha's face. On Saturday night there was a hard freeze-- down to about 28 degrees. Yesterday we were between storms, so it was cold and dry in Seattle. Then last night the Pineapple Express rolled in and now it will rain for the entire holiday week.

But on Sunday morning for a few magic minutes, the rising sun glittered like diamonds on every frosted leaf, and I ran outside with my camera. Art Wolfe, eat your heart out!

Magic sparkles on rusty fairy wings...

Ivy rimmed with frost...

The moment before geranium leaves turn to black mush...

Here's an old poem by Cecil Day Lewis. It's about waking up on a stunning, bright winter morning:

A Hard Frost

A frost came in the night and stole my world
And left this changeling for it - a precocious
Image of spring, too brilliant to be true:
White lilac on the window-pane, each grass-blade
Furred like a catkin, maydrift loading the hedge.
The elms behind the house are elms no longer
But blossomers in crystal, stems of the mist
That hangs yet in the valley below, amorphous
As the blind tissue whence creation formed.

The sun looks out and the fields blaze with diamonds
Mockery spring, to lend this bridal gear
For a few hours to a raw country maid,
Then leave her all disconsolate with old fairings
Of aconite and snowdrop! No, not here
Amid this flounce and filigree of death
Is the real transformation scene in progress,
But deep below where frost
Worrying the stiff clods unclenches their
Grip on the seed and lets
the future breathe.