I was sad when I looked out the window this morning.  There was the world, snowy and beautiful, certainly.  But for the first time in days I was not looking out around and between a translucent line of wintry swords. 

     Since our 20 inch snowfall a week ago, icicles had been growing and growing, lengthening from all  the eaves.  And these icicles were not the sparkly little crystalized drippings that normally trim a roof after a snowfall.  No, these icicles had gravitas.  They were muscular, burly, roughened and growing longer and more massive every day. 

     At the top of an eave, for example, a wide icy bulge formed, turning into a coarse, craggy curtain as it descended.  This drapery individuated into several pointed icicles only after it had lengthened by a foot or more.  And with the many brief thaws over the last week, the icicles dripped and refroze, dripped and refroze, growing longer every time. 

     And the icicles did not all lengthen evenly or gracefully.  No, the wind had other plans for them.  Some attenuated crookedly, others veered noticeably to one side;  some developed two points instead of one. 

     A few days ago I marveled that some of the icicles had reached a length of more than two feet.  The next day,  some had to have been at least a yard long.  By Christmas morning, some of the icicles were longer than most humans are tall!  One particularly dramatic icicle hung about five feet from the eave over an outdoor stairway, where it met the stair railing, gathered momentum from the snow melting there, and kept going.  Finally, this icicle came to a sharp, pointy end at least a foot below the railing.     

     There were also what I dubbed ’secondary’ and even ‘tertiary’ icicles.  During the dripping phases, the icicles hanging from the eave outside our front door dripped onto the top branches of the bony, bare shrub on the slope below.  These drops, in turn, became new icicles that hung into the naked branches of the shrub.  As these ’secondary’ icicles dripped through the shrub, more icicles formed, hanging from the shrub’s lowest branches, stabbing the snow on the ground.

     Even at night, the icicles made their presence felt.  When I looked out a window, all was hidden in darkness.  Except the icicles.  All I could see was my own reflection, behind shining sheaths of ice.  They did not seem so friendly;  I felt eerily like a prisoner  behind bars.

     And now all that is left of all these wintry beings, these creations of Mother Nature, in conjunction with our heated house, are a few short, dripping drapes.  The daggers and swords that have surrounded us for the past week are reduced to tiny pen knives, which soon will be gone.–April Moore

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Celebrating our beautiful Earth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.