A crystaline world

Friday morning we woke to a world transformed. Luckily for us there were no power outages in this small section of the province, but in a lot of places - trees and wires were down and Hydro was kept busy with repairs.

When we went outside I quickly returned to get my camera... there is a large silver maple on the west side of the house. It is beginning to bloom - but that morning it was completely encased in ice.

The rain and sleet in the night had been heavy. In most areas around the property there was a crust of snow and ice, beautiful filigree patterns in the ice and all the upright vegetation, trees, shrubs, weed stems - all seemed as if they shone through glass tubing.

Walking into the pasture we saw all the bird houses clad in icicles and sheets of ice on their east-facing sides.

Rooves coated, and the roof on the drive shed as well as the house completely coated as well.

Later on when the temperature rose a bit in the afternoon and I was busy at the computer, I thought I had a host of squirrels playing havoc inside my walls and got very excited - stamping on the floors and kicking the walls to get them to leave... the noise did not abate.

Then inside once more I heard the tumbling and began to laugh at myself. The noise was from bits of ice falling from the tree branches onto the deck, the roof of the house, everywhere. That too was magical - watching it come off in large tubes to shatter into sparkles and shards.

The birds stopped feeding for a while, until the branches were once again bare.

My car was also an ice-enclosed silver beast in the driveway. I went to open the driver's side door and pulled on the handle - the whole side cracked but only a bit fell off - the rest had slivered into many huge pieces and the suction with which it hung onto the car kept them all in place until finally they all melted.

Walking was better when it was partly frozen, after it melted, the dogs and I walked in a swamp and the cats refused to negotiate ground at all. Eleia does not like to get her feet wet on any occasion, and this was quite the affront.

An ice-clad world.

May you have a wonderful day - free from problems today and enjoy whatever comes your way - each day is a treasure I'm finding.