Despite getting only minute amounts of ice during our recent winter storm, I did want to share a few photographs I captured. I had to look high and low for some ice and found some neat little hidden treasures amongst the foliage of the Fraser photinia bushes (a.k.a. red-tip photinia, Photinia x fraseri) surrounding my patio. Lacking at best were the other reservoirs of evidence I found showing the visit by Old Man Winter. Unlike so many others across the country and even right here in the DFW metroplex, what you see below is the pinnacle of this past weekend’s events.
I do absolutely love the way icicles appear like frozen moments of time. They offer a sense of control, as though we can briefly peel off our temporal skin and look closely at an event—like a droplet of water falling from a leaf. There is magic in it no matter how minimal the overall effect.
There exists a world dangling from the end of each leaf, from the bend in each branch… worlds cast in cold and isolated by ice. They are worlds we can never know truly without destroying them. They are impenetrable to all of our senses save one: sight. Only with our eyes can we visit those places, for they remain otherwise forever removed from our existence.
Each one is a pocket of time maintained by the cold hand of winter. They are subject to the season’s whims, whole worlds created and destroyed with frigid breath and frosty caresses. As we stand detached from them aging by the incessant ticktock of cosmic time, inhabitants of these worlds rest timeless and ageless, held gently in the furtive grasp of infinity. They dance to a rhythm too slow for us to observe, one measured still by our senses, yet a kiss from the sun or a touch by warmer temperatures can shatter their cocoon and cast them back into the rushing torrent wherein the rest of us reside.
They are to be envied, these worlds.
[you can see an interesting close-up of that last icicle in this larger version; it truly is a universe frozen in a moment of time and suspended for the world to see]