Dear Hilly, I love your photos full of color from Sedona. I’m sitting in my living room, watching the sparrows build a nest in our birdhouse. The slightest bit of warmth, and they immediately get on task. Do they think it’s an early spring? Do they think they could fit in a brood before New Year’s? Where inside them is the urge to respond to the smallest opportunity for life? Hilly, I should have left it alone but instead I took this photo and then stripped all the color out of it. What is it in me that wanted the starkest portrayal of the line between life thriving and life quietly waiting? Between winter’s darkest days and the drive to survive? Love, Diane