Spring Is Coming, and Spring Is Here
First published in The Study of Light, on Substack, on March 24, 2026
The trash crew in Old San Juan making a Sunday night pick up.
Up here on the 45th Parallel, in Wisconsin, November, December, and January, and well, February and March get a bad rap. It’s the slate sky, the snow and ice, the muckiness and the long wait. After a white Christmas, if we’re lucky enough to have one, people get impatient and sometimes depressed. For a photographer, it’s not at all plain or bad. A smiling face really pops on a brown/gray November day. Cardinals thrill us more than ever. The plainness of a white landscape reduces competition for the eye, so we can literally focus on other things. Photographers are like winter athletes. We go out anyway, and make the most of it. We get outside to see what’s there, and maybe make it come alive in a new way, like, if we share it.
So yes to spring, summer, and fall, and hell yes to winter. And yes to the interruptions and surprises we find along the way.
The students I worked with spent a day on a mural project, creating the blue mural above. The orange mural was made by a previous group.
Every March I get to do some springtime work, not as a photographer, but helping out an organization that puts college students to work in disaster zones and impoverished places. The students fundraise and pay for the privilege to volunteer on their “alternative spring break.” It’s a long story that I am roughing out now, for a future post. As I wait for the third flight of the day to return me to Wisconsin, I am grateful for the opportunity to share some images of tropical Puerto Rico. Enjoy these colors, and if you live in the Midwest, remember that robins are already here. Crocuses will pop on the next warm, snowless stretch, followed quickly by tulips, daffodils, and irises. Summer in Wisconsin will explode into life (prompting this random-seeming quote by my favorite 14th century monk-mystic Meister Eckhart — “What does God do all day long? From the beginning of eternity, God lies on a maternity bed, giving birth to all.”)
May these colors give you a little boost of endorphins and hope in the meantime.
Some of the foliage on a stroll through the forest, including wild bananas and a tulip tree (the orange blossoms).
Our moon!