In our drinks, we take it for granted. But hanging from our eaves, ice becomes decorative, even magical as the icicles catch the scant winter light. Coating trees is another story, and there has been some of that in the region, though not too bad around here. I refuse to even try to walk or drive on ice, so I simply hunker down and enjoy the ice show. For a different experience, bring an icicle inside and hold over a bowl in your lap for an intriguing meditation focal object.

In my 20s when I lived in Manhattan, I had my own skates and enjoyed skating in Central Park. Sadly, the only ice rinks now are inside shopping malls–hardly the experience I would seek. Once I spent the winter holidays in Austria and took my skates with me. I’ll never forget skating on a pond in the Vienna Woods on Christmas Day–a greeting card come to life. Happy Whatever-Holiday-You-Celebrate!

I woke to a soft snowfall today, a rarity on this date at sea level.

the icicles cometh

To pass the dark month of December with an old friend, here is today’s green meditation, courtesy of Henry Thoreau.

The water is so transparent that the bottom can easily be discerned at the depth of twenty-five or thirty feet. Paddling over it, you may see, many feet beneath the surface, the schools of perch and shiners, perhaps only an inch long, yet the former easily distinguished by their transverse bars, and you think that they must be ascetic fish that find a subsistence there.

Once, in the winter, many years ago, when I had been cutting holes through the ice in order to catch pickerel, as I stepped ashore I tossed my axe back on to the ice, but, as if some evil genius had directed it, it slid four or five rods directly into one of the holes, where the water was twenty-five feet deep. Out of curiosity, I lay down on the ice and looked through the hole, until I saw the axe a little on one side, standing on its head, with its helve erect and gently swaying to and fro with the pulse of the pond; and there it might have stood erect and swaying till in the course of time the handle rotted off, if I had not disturbed it.

Making another hole directly over it with an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the longest birch which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I made a slip-noose, which I attached to its end, and, letting it down carefully, passed it over the knob of the handle, and drew it by a line along the birch, and so pulled the axe out again.