Snow on the Wasteland

I spent most of yesterday working in a suburban library. (It's not the closest one or the largest one - I go there because it's under-utilized, and I can always find a table to myself.)

This library is in a new housing development. Hundreds of townhouses, the proverbial "little boxes made of ticky tacky." I worked until closing, long after sunset. As I left, I saw the Christmas lights that the townhouse builder had put up in the tiny park in a futile attempt to make the place look festive.

Across the street are a few acres of land not yet bulldozed for housing. The trees on that land - now bare of leaves - had snow plastered to their trunks and branches on the windward side.

Those snow-covered trees on wasteland are far more beautiful than anything that builder had managed to achieve. Or ever will.