Winter's Ice Is Nice

Especially when it’s leaving.

Midwestern winters should be cold, snowy, and icy. But they should also know their place. Today’s sparkle of water dripping in the spring sun is a welcome reminder that the springmelt will soon begin in earnest. Too early to retire the shovel and the boots, but not too soon to imagine them back in their summer storage. What began as an unseasonably warm winter day has unexpectedly become a chilly but promising spring day, another winter moving toward memory.


In the busy grown-up world these transitions far too often slide past like the background of a movie, a sloppy, annoying, and dirty series of days that hurry by while the landscape fades from white and gray and cold, to green and blue and mild. Suddenly it’s spring. We rarely get to watch that change frame by frame.


I did once, around the age of 10. The house I grew up in faced an open farmfield. The field formed a modest valley, and the valley led away from our house, under a fence line, and into a cow pasture. At the heart of the pasture water gathered into a modest pond, where all summer long it would provide drinking water for cattle, and sanctuary for tadpoles, frogs, and water bugs.


One magical morning in early March, I noticed a flow of water just forming at the top edge of the field, beginning to work its way down the mild slope, through and over the snow. I walked along the front edge, keeping up as it cut through the snow, watching it grow wider as more snow melted. I followed all the way to the pond, where many more rivulets flowed down from all sides.


In the larger scope of life it was only a temporary stream in a nondescript field, on some unremarkable long-gone spring day. But because I happened upon it, that water still runs strong in me. It nourishes me, reminds me that life is a flow of moments, and that to catch one at its source is a rare and wonderful gift.