Sunday surprise

I hadn't expected this: a fresh blanket of new snow that arrived in the morning as Winter Storm Pandora swept by. There wasn't really enough to ski on, so I simply laced up my cold-weather boots and went for a walk, the all-weather Fuji in tow. I slipped and slid down my road and paused at the bottom of our hill at one of my favorite photo spots—my neighbor's tumbling-down barn. In the good weather, it's a magnet for various kinds of sparrows, but this morning, all bird life seemed to be in hiding. It wouldn't surprise me at all to discover that many of my avian friends are deep inside the parts of this decaying structure that can still keep the snow and rain at bay. If so, I'm not about to disturb them. Not, in truth, that I even could... here, the snow's just too deep to wade through, and I didn't bring my snowshoes.