Geneva in winter

Google’s scan is not a perfect app, but it gives you a reason to dig deeper into the archives to jog very old memories. These are thirty years old. I looked at the featured photo and remembered opening my bedroom window on a cold and sunny winter morning, marveling at this view, and then taking up my new camera to record Mont Blanc and the Saleve. I saw the peak clear very seldom, and I never had my camera at hand when I did. The scan app has introduced some glare into the bottom of the picture, and lost part of the definition that the print has. But it captures the clear blue of the sky, and the sun on crisp mornings which make you want to go out for a walk in the mountains.

One weekend that winter I drove out to Zermatt. I stopped the car and took this photo just before the road descends into the valley. It was not yet peak season, and I could just pull into a nice looking hotel and get a room. I had never been in snow like this before, and I decided that I would learn to ski. Over the weekend I got the hang of how to walk uphill with skis on. I realized early on that downhill was not for me. But learning this one technique was useful for the next two years, as I spent my free time in the Jura getting to like cross country skiing.

I remember doing a lot more in Geneva than my photos capture. I guess before phones one just didn’t take so many photos. The gnarly pine in silhouette above was taken at a little park called Promenade du Pin, which I would pass whenever I walked from the lake up to the cozy bars and restaurants at Place Bourg-de-Four. We would often stop to admire and laugh at the outrageously priced cigars on display at the window of a tobacconist on this route. I never thought to take a photo of the display. I would do it without thinking now.

Let me end with a picture of this gardening shed in the fields outside Meyrin. I remained amazed by how abruptly the city ended and gave way to farmland. In early spring I saw a tractor churning up the mud in fields like this, and in late summer there might be corn ripening in the sun. But I liked the bleak winter landscape with the locked shed, and snow covering the churned up mud.