Midwinter Dark

Lane Creek in midwinter

In the low light of midwinter our countryside is a landscape in shades of black and white. The tall green spruce of summer now stand black against the winter snow. The birches, in a different shade of winter white are marked with black blotches of bark climbing up their trunks. The grey black of the cottonwood is lined with a darker grey black outlining sections of bark. The willow and alders are black and all the usual bushes, the berries and roses and such, to the extent they may still poke out of deep snow are all in varying shades of black.
Even the birds are black and white. Chickadees with black caps and hairy and downy woodpeckers with their black and white polka dots spend the day flitting back and forth to the feeder. The raven is black, the ptarmigan white, in feathers grown just for the season. In the creek the slate black water ouzel dances up and down perfectly matched to the slate black gravel below the water, still open and running in the cold.
Above it all the sky is a shade of white determined by the weather, bluish white on a clear day, whitish blue if it is cloudy, grey white if snow is on the way.
It takes the sun to bring the colors back, to put the green back in the spruce,  the red back in the branches of the willow. Only the sun can find all the subtle shades of pink and purple and orange and magenta hiding in the white bark of the birch. Only the sun can bring back violet blue skies.