The Culling

Barley, a dog, pokes about amid accumulating snow, in a patch where all the plants have recently been trimmed back very aggressively.

As the snow accumulation began to make itself felt, the weather’s ominous heaviness was enhanced by the recent decision to very aggressively trim back nearly all of the greenery around all the buildings. The motivation, no doubt, is that when Spring arrives, we’ll get a ton of new, green growth that will be more pleasing to the eye than the thick tangle of crisscrossing shrubs we had before, but for the time being, the flora already had a “my least qualified family member gave me this haircut” feel to it. As much as a dusting of snow makes this that much starker, I think Barley mostly sees it as opening new frontiers. These areas were, until a few weeks ago, wholly impassable, so now she wants to follow her nose and see what mysteries this newly revealed terrain might hold.