Two weeks ago, freezing temperatures gave way to an ice storm Thursday night, lasting deep into Friday. We didn’t get hit too hard: just about a tenth of an inch of ice, just enough to leave a glaze across the snow, and to glass everything else.
Freezing rain kept up until just after sunlight broke through the gray, wind carrying moisture back to us as the storm passed. The morning light lit up everything from inside: frozen rain refracting prismatically, crazily-infinitely-in every direction.
The wind kept up all day long, at first making wind chimes of tree branches and dry grasses, and then cracking the ice everywhere, raining sharp cold crystals across the glassed red bricks at our front door.
Icy deadfall branches snapping loudly and shattering into splinters.
These mid-winter ice storms are arresting. Not just because they keep me locked in place, but because they sharpen experience, bringing attention to the everyday by crystallizing every tree branch, every brick, every blade of long frozen grass. It’s the same grass, the same brick, the same tree branch, attenuated by the ice, just slightly more focused by the sharp light refracting through and across the line of sight.
Cold winter silence deepened by the sharpened rustle of ice against ice in the wind, the sound carried crisply in dry frigid air.
Stepping outside and taking off my gloves, I run my fingers through that infinitely lit, frozen pale grass. It’s cold enough to grab the skin of my bare hands and sharp enough to cut my fingers open as the ice cracks apart.
Experience made solid.
Light sharp enough to shatter thought, touch cold enough to tear skin, sound crisp enough to crack thinking-to crack all my senses-open into shards breaking onto icy red brick.
Just that light, just that sound.