The wintry mix didn’t come on “silent cat feet;” but was noisier, rain’s regular old sound mixed with the “tink” of sleet. Sometimes the sleet’s sound increased to an overpowering static, drowning out the rain the way the scratches on an overly played vinyl drown out the music when they come around.
The ground seemed too warm, so the rain froze more in that “middle ground” between earth and sky (trees, not the Twilight Zone).
The icy “halo” around each branch was more enwrapping, like a burka.
There, on the local paper’s obituary page was the portrait of a lady topped by a bright, “icy” ring, of course, not ice; but a halo, part of the “amenities” of that particular mortuary. Heavenly halos might just as well be made of pure, crystalline ice, since there, the soul has no notion of “too hot” or “too cold,” being somewhat like Goldilocks, residing in a place where every thing’s “just right!”
These fallen fragments were the cylindrical, outer “casts” of twigs they had once enclosed. I thought of similar “ice tubes” in the Coca Cola drink boxes of the 1950s, when I was growing up. In a previous column, I mentioned the old drink box at the little snack store run by the late Tommy Webb at the old South Salisbury Township Fire Department building (long since shuttered). When ice broke loose from those refrigerative coils, it also formed little cylinder-shaped casts, just like what had fallen from the tree twigs.
When I saw Tommy some years ago at Saint Paul’s Lutheran’s homecoming, he joked about my saying in that previous column that he was “in charge” of the fire station; and that he had received a little good-natured trouble (not really “trouble”) about it from the fire chief. I told Tommy I was sorry, but as a little boy, I thought he ran it; and evidently that impression of his being “in charge” was so strong that it had survived into adulthood (and in a way, I still feel Tommy was in charge, despite his correction that day).
Depending on twig and branch circumference, the larger ice casts of that most recent wintry mix were like more baritonal “ice flutes,” the smallest being piccolo or coloratura soprano range. A friend owns a piccolo trumpet, graciously enduring the occasional,obligatory “toy trumpet” joke. But the ice tubes weren’t playable, as there were no holes; plus they were shattered. Water is a source of music in the “glass harmonium,” but there it isn’t frozen.
If it had been sunny, those branch-shaped “prisms” of ice would have refracted the same way raindrops do to form rainbows, also the way upper ice crystals form bright color-hinted “sundogs,” so called because they accompany the sun, just as the constellations Canis Major (Great Dog) and Canis Minor (Lesser Dog) accompany Orion (The Hunter) on the hunt.
If sundogs were to suddenly “drop out of the hunt,” as they were,and fall to the ground, along with the noctilucent clouds (other high “crystalline” clouds resembling UFOs), their remains would resemble tree-fallen ice, only finer. If a “UFO cloud” were to somehow fall and shatter in your back yard, it would be like being treated to your own private “Roswell” (of a sort).
The fallen “ice flutes” were tacit, but that night there was “ice percussion” from above. The ice higher up in the trees remained; fitting, since that’s where the super-chilled rain had first met surfaces on which to freeze.The icy branches struck together in the breeze, making a strange sort of “glassy” sound. Gustav Mahler wrote for the percussive beating of twigs, but what I heard would have been impossible in the warm symphony hall (if it were possible, Mahler would have done it; he didn’t do it, so it’s impossible).
The next day, all of the ice melted away; and my analogies were at end (at least for then) except one: ice gone to water in a set-aside drink cup.