Between Storms
Eliot, Maine

Some photographs happen because you go looking for them. Others appear quietly while you’re simply moving through the day.

This one happened somewhere in between.

I was driving through Eliot, Maine on a winter day when the snow had already fallen but the sky felt like it was holding back more. The kind of light that settles over New England in winter, soft, gray, and patient. Not dramatic. Just present.

And then this car appeared.

It sat partially buried in the snow, facing the road as if it had been waiting there for a long time. The chrome grille and headlights pushed through the white like a face peering out from a blanket. Snow rested across the hood and windshield, softening its lines and muting its colors. Around it, the trees stood bare and quiet, the whole scene wrapped in the stillness that comes after a storm but before the next one arrives.

I pulled over.

There was no movement anywhere, no people, no traffic, just that particular winter silence that seems to absorb sound. The car didn’t feel abandoned as much as paused. Like it had simply been left there to ride out the season.

What caught me first was the symmetry. The car squarely facing forward, the headlights balanced on either side of the grille, the snow shaping everything into simple forms. It felt less like a document of an old automobile and more like a portrait, something about time, waiting, and the quiet endurance of objects that outlast the moments around them.

I’ve always been drawn to cars like this. Not the polished showpieces or restored museum examples, but the ones that exist in the everyday landscape. Cars that have lived a life. That have been driven, parked, forgotten, and rediscovered. They carry traces of people and places even when no one is around.

In winter, that feeling becomes stronger. Snow slows everything down. It simplifies the world. Shapes become clearer, details soften, and time seems to stretch a little.

Standing there in Eliot, camera in hand, it felt like the scene existed in a small pause between events, between storms.

Eventually the snow will melt. The car might move again, or maybe it won’t. But for that moment it was exactly where it needed to be, held in place by the quiet weight of winter.

Sometimes that’s all a photograph is: noticing a moment that might otherwise pass by unnoticed.

And stopping long enough to see it.