The appearance of this blog has changed four times in the last three weeks and many of you have now started to theorize about a new diagnosis where bloggers have a specialized form of ADD. And I can just see you lifting your noses in disgust because changing your header four times in three weeks is so last year and why is she so indecisive, for Pete’s sake.

You know that lovely header I had all year with the raised arms? Shameless Google image. I took it off becuase I wanted any pictures to be mine, since that would be more real and I wouldn’t have to pretend to be an amazing photographer.

But I had trouble there because I’m not a photographer.

The third header of the month was my picture and was going be the last attempt.  It did stay up for a while.  It was melancholy and artsy and only showed what skin I thought wasn’t ugly and too much of it. 

But the truth is, I’m not melancholy. Sometimes I stare off into space, but just as often I smile at the wall for no reason at all.  And I am not artsy. I have an appalling attraction to plaid cowboy shirts that my friend Becky despairs at and  would rather sit grungy by the campfire than sip lattes at the local street cafe.

It was a nice look. And I liked the way it made me seem–all deep and spiritual. So obviously its days were numbered, like I should have known.

Then, the other day, winter came and made everything raw and transformed even my sandy beach into a wild wilderness. 

Storms pile waves, layer after layer, and snow freezes before another wall of water becomes stone.

I don’t even recognize it and stand 10 feet above what used to be smooth sand and my mouth drops at the way of ice.

  

“We’re not going to fall in?”, of course I have to ask. “Well, not exactly”, he says, which I find out later, means not unless I go too close.

 We spend two hours leaning over the edge and avoiding the wide cracks and we could be Skackleton the way the ice grabs our boots.

And after a week of straining to see the power points and hours of typing words on social determinants of health, the ice is calm and beautiful and the cold lake air is life itself to my stale lungs.

I love the new look.

 Molten ice flows like water over chucks of hardened snow and who needs a warm beach when you have this kind of beauty with a warm hat and your jacket is zipped up.

 Suddenly I realize I am alive again and, photographer or not, I decide that I might as well be myself and so I take off the melancholy and my new look is nothing more than what I saw, laughed at, and took a picture of. No hidden symbolism, no allegory to my life, no interpretation needed.

 This one is going to stick around for a while. I promise.