Snow on branches

I hope, and expect, that for as long as I live, scenes like this one will never fail to fill me with wonder. The photo, taken this morning out of my bathroom window, really doesn’t do it justice.

When I was in college, shortly after the peak of society’s interest in fractals, Pete and I stayed up late (and by the standards of my college years, that’s really saying something) one winter night writing programs to draw simple Julia Sets (or something very similar to them anyway, it was a fractal recipe out of the book *Chaos* by James Gleick). After a short sleep, I woke up to go to class, and some amazing frozen rain was thickly covering all of the branches of all of the trees, all the way to the tips. They glistened brilliantly in the morning sunlight, and the similarity to the fractal images floating in my brain were inescapable. I’d seen such things before and since, but this was the most beautiful such scene I can recall. And, of course, the fractal factor made it even more striking.

So, every time now that I see a scene like this one, I’m reminded of that amazing morning.