I took a walk yesterday to my neighbor’s pond. It’s not a large pond, taking up less than acre of space, and was dug a few years before I came to this place. An overflow pipe juts out of the water at the eastern end of it, and there’s a small dock there now, too.
As I approached the little pond through the woods, I noticed that it has begun to glaze over with ice. While it won’t be frozen solid until well into January, already, I was able to skim a few twigs across it, watching them skate to a stop in the middle. There is something about being alone in the woods that makes a 60-year-old woman do things she would prefer no one else see.
This is the same pond that I visited two years ago during the ice storm that hit in December 2008. I lost power for nearly a week that time, the longest yet since I’ve been here, but I managed. I kept a cast iron skillet on the woodstove at all times, as well as several pans of water. You do not realize how much water you waste until you are without it for a week and must wash, shampoo your hair, and do the dishes on a single gallon. It becomes a precious commodity then, a truth brought home when the lights, and the water pump, go off.
The day after the storm, I was compelled to go to the pond. All around me, the trees were still encased in ice, and it sounded like a gun going off each time a chunk fell off a branch. I spent several fretful hours wondering which of my trees would finally fall on top of this place, but I was lucky that time with only two small ones falling a safe distance away. I surmised that, if my immediate environment were still ice-bound, then the pond might have some surprises for me.
I was not wrong.
All along the path, the trees hung under their loads of ice, in some places just inches from the ground. But it was the pond that took my breath away, where the trees on all sides were bent to the water, their tops trapped and frozen in the ice. Had there been more level space at the edge of the pond, I could conceivably have walked in an ice tunnel all around it. I stood in awe at the sight, not a single tree having escaped the burden that storm had placed upon them all.
Then, the sun came out, and I felt transported to another world, a world where the trees are made of diamonds and the earth just one enormous mirror. I chided myself for forgetting to bring my camera, but I knew that I wouldn’t have time to run home for it before nature undid her work and the trees snapped up straight again. For it doesn’t take long once the sun appears for the ice to start dripping off the trees, and I hadn’t quite reached the back porch before it began, the popping and snapping as the crystalline tears hit the frozen ground, accumulating there like millions of uncut gems.
While I don’t wish for another ice storm such as that, or another extended power outage, I will always welcome such sights in winter when the world around me is magically transformed into something only possible in dreams. The time is nearly upon us again, and I find myself wondering what gifts I will be given this year that will need no wrappings or ribbons, gifts that, no matter how often they are given, I never tire of receiving.
— Rachel Lovejoy is a freelance writer living in Lyman. She can be reached via e-mail at rlovejoy84253@roadrunner.com.
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