Safety Fork, the

Happy new year, o hapless reader!

I had planned to drive across the city to spend this evening with friends. A little after four in the afternoon—a few hours after the morning’s rain had turned to snow—I decided to walk to the coffee shop around the block. I wanted to see how the roads looked (and, of course, to have a mint mocha). On my way there, I saw a taxi futilely trying to drive uphill; I saw a minor accident and a police car heading to it—at a speedy twenty miles per hour; I saw a minivan sliding sideways down a fairly heavily-traveled street. I emailed from the coffee shop that I wasn’t risking a forty-mile round trip. It wasn’t so much the condition of the roads that gave me pause. I’ve driven farther on worse in the past. It was the thought of sharing those roads with thousands of other holiday travelers, some of whom obviously don’t have the patience required to not send their minivans sideways down the street.

I don’t know when the snow stopped falling. I walked back to my apartment a little before six o’clock, was absorbed by a novel, and didn’t look out again until ten-thirty, when it looked like this:

Before I’d even started setting up that shot—before I’d finished planting the tripod legs in the snow on my balcony—I accidentally bumped my hand-made shutter-release button. I’m glad I stopped fiddling with it until the shutter closed again, as it turns out I like the accidental result: