One of the first things I'm going to have to do as soon as the year turns over is to get my eyes checked. Case in point: when I was out on the trail today, I stopped to scan a stretch of frozen water, an area that was more a puddle than a vernal pool. My eyes were drawn to a spot near the center, and when I focused on it with my walk-around lens, my 55–200mm, I experienced a touch of sadness about what I was sure I was seeing: a snail that had been trapped by the cold and was now entombed, probably until the spring, in the ice. I was guessing that the snail's bad luck would prove fatal—I don't know how much surface cold this invertebrate can take, but I thought that it was not much—so my shot would be a record of what I hoped was an ecologically satisfying life, complete with many descendants. Nice sentiments... nice fiction. But when I got home and looked at the story I'd concocted, the sad tale, of course, fell apart. What I'd seen and photographed was, in fact, an acorn that was resting on a bed of barely submerged moss when the ice arrived on the scene. The acorn, if it didn't get eaten by a squirrel, would be fine come spring and maybe even sprout when the puddle dried. Good fiction... bad eyes.