Jaci Dawn

I will miss the ice now that it is gone. There’s something so delicately beautiful about ice and frost.

I love the way crystals form and the colors are more vivid.

Frost on the windshield looks like leafy ferns and glittering silver.

The frost was still forming as I sat in my truck snapping photos. Little “pings” of new stars on the thick glass.

As pretty as it was, I still had to dig out the ice scraper and be the practical adult, destroying its fragile beauty in a few swipes at the cold glass.

Darn that we have to grow up and lose our fascination with the beauty of the cold. When we were children, all that snow and ice didn’t mean hardship or danger. We pulled on our socks, long underwear, boots and mittens, our hats and our heavy coats, and we went out to play until our toes were so cold they felt like they no longer belonged to our bodies. (I was always afraid I’d pull my boots off and find that my toes really had separated from my feet and were rolling around in my socks, frozen.)

All the contrasts: green grass, the pink flowers on the heather, the blue-white of ice and the red rocks in the water. If you stop to think about it, it is breathtakingly beautiful.

If you don’t try to think too much like an adult who has to get in a car and drive across town on roads that might have black ice on them.

Darn grown-ups anyway: always pointing out how inconvenient frost, ice and snow are.

Our clod snap is nearly over. We did not get the predicted 2-4″ of snow (no surprise: seems like the more the media hypes up a storm, the less likely it is to happen). There’s a little freezing rain out there and a chance of more of it tonight, but we’re slowly moving into a much warmer air flow.

The kid in me doesn’t want to let go of the frost and ice, but the adult in me is relieved.