Beautiful clear morning with a glowing periwinkle sky.  Some places post the temperatures as 25 F, others say it's up to 28 now.  Warmer than yesterday morning.  

Hoarfrost haunts shadows and hollows, outlining buildings, railings and plants, defining the places where the sun failed to strike, day and day again.  Old snow has developed thick, granular crusts, losing their snow white glisten and acquiring grubby hues.  

Up early to get outside and escape the inside, to revisit the natural world, which hasn't been with me enough lately, to stretch limbs, observe, learn, and think.  To the coffee shop I'll go, taking the long way, through the housing plants with their small, neat yards and craftsman styles, down along the old cemetaries, one and two, where markers note people lived and died.  I'll go out along the fields where native Americans once camped, pioneers explored and livestock grazed.  Now the fields are set up so children and adults can play tennis, baseball and softball.  I'll pass the marker where a local man was killed in 2011, one of our handful of mysterious deaths since my arrival here six years ago.

I'll turn and go up past the 'new school' which has been used for years, and the 'old school', unused as the community tries to decide what to do with it.  I'll pass the new dorms being built, massive buildings standing several storys above the landscape, and around the old dorms, squat, gray form follows function blunt concrete designs, built in the 1970s, when they believed in form follows design as clean, modern and futuristic.  

I'll gaze across the valley to the hills and mountains.  My eyes will follow contrails as jets cut across the sky.  The sounds of motor vehicles will rise and fall.

My trip will take me along sidewalks, bicycle paths, streets, roads, highways, railroad tracks, across bridges and along rabbit paths.  Every path and building has a story but I'll be thinking about my own.