Held Over

The ice remained, today, and will likely be here until Friday or Saturday.  We're expecting record cold tonight, and again tomorrow, with the forecast saying ten degrees tonight and 7 tomorrow night, with highs remaining below freezing.

I am not sorry.

I feel for those still without power, and I feel for those who have to be out in this chill, but it's so very lovely, and I am in sore need of loveliness.

Sprout and I were out running errands today.  It was necessary or I would have kept us home baking cookies.  I'm glad we had to go out.

While much of Redneck Central has largely thawed, for some reason our little corner of it is still glazed, with the added sugaring of a few snow flurries.  As I drove, the sun played hide-and-seek with the clouds, and from time to time light...glorious light...burst forth from the frozen landscape.

Opals, diamonds, rainbow moonstones, shattered light bouncing from every surface, every fractured piece of ice a prism.  I chanced to glance to one side at a grove of small trees and I wept.  There is no camera can do it justice, and certainly I couldn't.  We haven't words in our language to describe it.  A beauty transcendent.

All day the trees have gone from cloudy-day steel and iron to bright sun light and flashing icy fire, and all day I have been caught in the transformation that will disappear with the next warm day or rainfall.

Mandala-like, it is impermanent...held over for one more day.

Wonderland.

There was a storm yesterday.  Rain and cold became ice and cold, until everything that did not move was coated in a layer of chill light refraction.

How lovely the world seems, coated in ice.  The sun is dancing in and out of the clouds, great grey sky-veils floating on to new destination.  Our windows are high from the ground, looking out them we are in among the tree middles and tops, and the view is ethereal right now.  We can see the icicles dripping, lengthening, and finally falling to earth.

Crash!

Crunch!

Splash!!

Thud!

Ice falls in sheets and chunks, smacks the ground with a bounce before settling.  Considering the number of trees around the Casa, we have gotten of with little damage to our piece of the world - a few branches could not hold out for the melt, one tree suffered a greater loss - one of its larger branches is now in the yard instead of two stories up.  Had we fireplace or stove, next year would need no wood cut for all the smaller branches in the woods.  So far, our Popcorn Tree has limbs bowed, tips sweeping the ground, but is unbroken.

As the sun shines in fits and starts, twigs shoot sparks of light in every direction, almost but not quite prismatic.

We will eschew the outdoors for a while, today, in favor of not being pelted with falling chunks of ice.  Among the lucky, we didn't lose power in the night and perhaps will not lose it today, either, so I plan to make soup, bake cookies, and do things indoors while the children become wilder as the day wears on and they are trapped inside with all their endless energy.