As Christmas approaches so does the colder weather that heralds the arrival of the winter solstice. While the light from the sun is at its nadir for the year, it is only beginning to become cold. Moving forward the temperatures continue to retreat to the teens and even lower. It is the beginning of the time when some days barely warm. That and a spate of cloudy days takes its toll on the surrounding ground. The sound of walking no longer is a squishy squirt of water but the soft crunch of ice recently frozen. This thin coating permeates the ground trapping all smells. Fresh cold air fills the lungs with each inhale.
Fruit and vegetables no longer rot in the compost pile but are held in suspended animation, unchanging and uneaten by the mammals who often invade it. If it rains during the day, tiny icy lakes form overnight in log hollows and rock crevices. These bright spots reflect the light that can now penetrate the canopy of bare branches reaching the leaf littered ground.
And when we get consecutive days of sub freezing weather, even running water takes a pause by forming ice. Limbs in a nearby stream capture the water in clear layers adding more depth each day. The evolving pattern of nature’s ice sculpture is not predictable or recognizable as thin strands of frozen water bloom into large flowering crystals without any guidance save that of the wind, light and sun. If the cold keeps up the flow of water may become even more attenuated as a thin skin of ice first forms around the shore edges and then reaches out across the stream forming a single sheet with its counterpart on the other side.
