When I moved to Atlanta from California last year, people kept calling the city “Hotlanta.” Nobody mentioned snow. I figured the worst winter would bring was a chilly rain.
Then I woke up yesterday morning and looked out the window. The entire neighborhood was white. Trees, cars, rooftops, everything coated in ice and snow. In Atlanta.
I grabbed my camera and went outside. The streets were empty. Almost all my neighbors were staying cozy indoors, which I understand. But I had a camera and a city that looked like it had been dipped in glass.
The first thing that stopped me was the ice on the leaves. Not snow sitting on top, but clear ice encasing them completely, like nature had vacuum-sealed its own foliage.
The berries were even more striking. Clusters of bright red frozen inside perfectly transparent ice, the color somehow more vivid than it would be on a warm day. The green leaves underneath still looked alive, just suspended.
Some branches had it worse than others. The weight of the ice pulled them down toward the ground, long icicles hanging from every stem and twig. You could hear the occasional crack of a limb giving way somewhere in the distance.
I walked over to the park nearby. The whole scene was surreal. Open grass covered in white, every tree branch outlined in ice against a grey sky. It looked like a winter postcard from New England, not Georgia.
Back on my street, the ice-covered trees arched over the road like a frozen tunnel. Cars sat buried under a layer of white. This is a city where schools close if the forecast even mentions the word “ice.” Today they were right to.
It only snows on one or two days per year here, and some years not at all. I am glad I went out with the camera instead of staying inside. Atlanta is not supposed to look like this, and that is what made it worth photographing.