Still in last week’s mood, not writing about massive snow because I’ve seen it before, I’ll write about its leaving. Of course, snow only melts one way, but each time that “world of white” crashes, it seems to do so just a little differently.

With the quick rise in temperature following the “big snow,” on un-cleared walkways it seemed to be turning gray just below the surface. I thought of “Chilly Willy” and “Slushies,” but couldn’t possibly imagine how a gray Slushy would taste, not knowing the fruit equivalent of “gray.”

The plows left a wall of broken, angular plates on each side of the streets. Some were being whittled down by melting, looking like thin pedestals supporting overlying clumps, reminiscent of rock formations in Utah’s “Valley of the Goblins” where a couple of idiots once toppled a formation and took pictures of themselves high-fiving each other for the Internet.

Speaking of that particular, hand-slapping, high-five, I calculate the combined total of those two men’s I.Q. to equal “40” (arrived at by multiplying the total number of human digits for one person (20) by two, my sole reliance on “gut feeling,” fingers, and toes eliminating any need for Stanford-Binet and calculator).

Some slowly melting, 2-foot icicles recalled to me the 6-foot monstrous “lances” hanging from the roof of my boyhood, Old Concord Road home, particularly that corner facing Paul and Mary Ruth Ritchie’s house at the point where the main roof joined that of the porch.

I’m sure my brother Joe knows the exact roof corner, as do Bob, Bunny, Charlie and Pam (not a movie of the late 1960s, but instead those who lived there post “me,” and who live there now).

On a stone wall’s cornice, down the street from my present address, I was reminded of Luray Cavern’s “fried egg” formations. The yolk of this “ice-fried egg” was white, not yellow, and the perfectly circular “egg-white” was early morning “black ice.”

One pristine spot was untouched by tracks or fallen twigs. Its melting would most likely resemble a film in reverse.

In many places, the edges of melting snow gave the appearance of being raised, like a scab late into the process of healing. Some newly uncovered grass did look greener and healthier, so perhaps it actually benefitted from that “mustard plaster-like” application of frozen water. But maybe it was only one of perception’s “tricks.”

Other strange, natural “melt sculptures” were developing. One, with a middle-placed hole, looked like a mini-version of either the Arc de Triomphe or Titus’ arch; but I saw nothing as complicated as a mini-Brandenburg Gate, or tiny versions of those still-working aqueducts in Italy and Spain.

Many formations reminded me of something one might see on a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There were a few monolithic forms in the snow, which seemed by day’s end to be getting higher, but it was only because the snow around them was leaving. (Einstein was right; everything is “relative.”)

At the wheel, I encountered newly formed potholes; but on shaded streets, lumps of packed ice, as far above the pavement as the potholes reached below. I began calling them “pothills.”

The arteries of travel throughout the city were still restricted on both sides by all of that piled up, “frozen plaque.”

A brief cloudbank rolled in, and the sun was only as bright as one of it’s faithful “dogs” (a light-refracting, meteorological phenomenon sometimes seen on opposite sides of the solar disc, but I have often seen only one of the pair ).

A couple of days later, on the used rail where the Danville Science Center’s Norfolk and Western caboose (circa 1948) is parked, I saw something odd! Due to a thermal quirk, the snow had melted everywhere except where it totally covered the old crossties, green grass showing between, that wood now looking like “snowties.” Over such, a truly “polar” express might ride!

In afternoon sun, a shimmering, rippling “snake” of melt water slithered down a hill from melting snow, looking like a “glass snake.” (There is such, so-named in nature, though not prone to shattering.)

The next morning, a final remnant of snow lay beside where a man had placed his pork shoulder-filled barbecue cooker. As the entire neighborhood absorbed that wonderful “odor,” I thought about the absorption powers of snow.

Oh well, I guess only a native of Rowan or Davidson counties would ever allow his mind to entertain the unlikely possibility of “hickory-flavored snow cream!”