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Walking along the edge of a frozen beach, I reached the point of no return. At 8 degrees Fahrenheit, shivering from the cold, I watched as chunks of ice danced with the rhythm of the waves at 10:30 in the morning. I stopped before the path leading to the Montrose Harbor Lighthouse, motionless, as I admired the scenic beauty of the port and its icy surface.

As I made my way back along the trail, I noticed shapes I had previously overlooked. Carved into the limestone blocks that frame the beach dunes were the silhouettes of Monty and Rose—two small piping plovers that, despite Chicago’s harsh climate, had chosen to nest on that beach for several years.

As I looked at them, two words echoed in my mind: time and memory. Are they symbols of hope and resilience? No—they are much more. Monty and Rose chose to nest in a place where no piping plovers had dared to return in over fifty years. Waiting and resilience became the perfect formula to leave, after raising their chicks, an indelible mark of time and memory in the sand. But fate was unforgiving: not long after, Monty died, and Rose never returned to walk that beach again.

Something as fragile as life—and generations of hatched chicks—endures in a winter landscape that stretches like a spotless mantle, erasing the traces of the past while simultaneously preserving their fleeting imprint. Each falling snowflake seems to whisper secrets of time, leaving delicate marks on a vast white canvas where memory fuses with the present moment.

Today I think that this silent, frozen space transforms, with the passage of time, into an almost tangible dimension, a sigh that slips between the folds of existence. Those engravings in the limestone become a fragile reminder of who we were: intense moments, decisions that dissolve with the breeze, fragments of memory that refuse to be forgotten. Like a dark night or the vast sea, every trace in the snow evokes the duality of existence: the fleeting nature of the moment and the persistence of what was lived.

At times, memory may feel as cold as that winter beach, merciless in the face of passing time. Yet in the warmth of summer, it becomes a refuge—a place where emotions and experiences intertwine, weaving a personal narrative that defies the relentless eruption of days.

It is a play of light and shadow, where past and present meet—revealing each memory, even as it fades into whiteness, and leaving an echo that shapes our being until the end. This ephemeral landscape invites us to reflect on the past that dissolves and the future that glimmers in every flicker of light. Memory is the indelible trace the soul leaves on the path of time, just like the figures of Monty and Rose etched into the limestone.

And so, in every snow-drawn line lies the promise of a tomorrow and the reverence for what once was—inviting us to walk with the awareness that time, in its endless dance, is also the guardian of our most intimate memories.

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