“Winter’s Litter”
“For so long I have lived on the edge of an invisible world. Sometimes I feel like the scattered debris left over after the personality has fallen out of the sky.”
― Steve Rasnic Tem
This is my final 2017 photo, made during a VERY cold hike on the second last day of December. Temperatures were around -25C and the air was calm and crisp. Crisp is an understatement, it was brutally cold, especially when I stopped hiking to make a photo.
Something that really caught my attention was large patches of fallen oak leaves, lying on the firmly packed snow; winter’s litter. It’s one of those odd things that I have not witnessed in the past many years on the trails. I suppose some leave had simply hung on after our extended autumn and the extreme cold combined with some moderate wind has now knocked them down. As I stood here and looked up, there was no evidence of any leaves remaining. Winter is firmly entrenched now.
Nikon D800
Tamron SP AF 90mm f/2.8 Di Macro 1:1 (272ENII)@90mmm
1/500 sec, f/11.0, ISO 400
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Ed Lehming Photography 
I have a post coming out soon about tree litter too, but about branches, not leaves. It really is interesting how weather affects the cycles of nature. Occasionally here in Saskatchewan, green leaves will fall off the trees overnight if there’s a really hard early frost.
We had that here in early December. Many leaves stayed up till the first snowfall, then a mix of snow and leaves covered everything.