When I arrived at my front row seat, the sun had already started to set. I looked out across the pond and saw wood ducks preening on low tree branches and splashing in the water.
On the south side of Chicago, I walked across snow-covered sand on an icy lakeshore. The ice that had formed where water met beach lowly creaked as water moved underneath it. The winter day was cold, but, thankfully, there was a lack of wind whose harshness would have only been magnified by traveling across Lake Michigan.