Winter’s talent is in encasing its icy chill in scenes of other-worldly beauty. While driving a frigid dagger into warm flesh, it distracts with the pretty wonders of ice, momentarily sculpting the smallest waves of water into architectural swirls that sparkle in the light of the sun.
Freezing the dark green needles of the Japanese umbrella pine – an architectural marvel of its own – this winter ice accentuates the beauty of the season, holding a scene of weeping in frozen place. Winter can still the heart that way, forcing us to either gasp in relief or hold it all in, pretending that we are all right with the freeze.
When I was a young boy, I’d seek out scenes like this on winter walks in the wooded bank behind our home. Water would occasionally pool between tree roots, forming little ponds of ice, or drip beneath the eaves of the pool house, splashing onto an iron fence and dropping icicles in opposition to the steel spikes that pointed upward.
The whispered secrets of a pine bough, told only in a masked brush of wind, would be silenced in such ice – the chattering and shattering when the wind came again was a telling bit of hell-bent destruction for having tried to quiet them. We will too often hurt ourselves in our efforts to hurt others.
Winter is a fickle beast who won’t be tamed for a while.
