The snow continues to surprise me. Freezing rain fell all afternoon, and the crust of ice on top feels harder and slicker than before. But on the driveway, it’s sloppy and slushy underneath, like my childhood nightmare of petting an animal only to find that it was dead and the skin had started sloughing and slippering around.
The mailbox is frozen properly shut now, can’t open it even pulling with both hands. That’s ok; there are no tracks suggesting that any delivery services were mad enough to try to operate in this. The fir needles are still visible atop the snow, but on closer inspection they’re under a few millimeters of solid ice. Oddly it’s easier to walk now, because the packed snow gives more easily.
When I poke the snow on the road with my index finger, it yields slowly and reluctantly, perhaps rotted out from below by the water moving and making it a little bit translucent from underneath. The snow on a tree stump nearby looks just the same, but poking it feels like prodding at chilly glass.
The eaves of the pumphouse are long, and looked from a distance as if the snow was missing from the final 6″ or so above the gutter. I wondered what could possibly have melted the snow off just that part. Upon closer inspection it wasn’t gone at all, just saturated with rain that had fallen on the whole roof and succumbed slowly to gravity. Snow full of water gets clear like water—ice and water have much closer indices of refraction than ice and air, hence why snow looks white and so reflectively blinding.
Coming home, I found some of what’s been falling from the sky, caught on a surface that I’d cleaned well just yesterday. Air quality has been good-enough in the interim, so I scooped a bit up to chew on. The texture is a bit like a snow cone, but different—snowcones are strips cut like wood-shavings or shards like from a rock-crusher, but these are all perfect little spheres. The texture of myriad ice spheres moving against one another is subtly but distinctly different from other shapes, as I would have expected if I’d tried to guess first.
The snow continues to surprise me. Freezing rain fell all afternoon, and the crust of ice on top feels harder and slicker than before. But on the driveway, it’s sloppy and slushy underneath, like my childhood nightmare of petting an animal only to find that it was dead and the skin had started sloughing and slippering around.
The mailbox is frozen properly shut now, can’t open it even pulling with both hands. That’s ok; there are no tracks suggesting that any delivery services were mad enough to try to operate in this. The fir needles are still visible atop the snow, but on closer inspection they’re under a few millimeters of solid ice. Oddly it’s easier to walk now, because the packed snow gives more easily.
When I poke the snow on the road with my index finger, it yields slowly and reluctantly, perhaps rotted out from below by the water moving and making it a little bit translucent from underneath. The snow on a tree stump nearby looks just the same, but poking it feels like prodding at chilly glass.
The eaves of the pumphouse are long, and looked from a distance as if the snow was missing from the final 6″ or so above the gutter. I wondered what could possibly have melted the snow off just that part. Upon closer inspection it wasn’t gone at all, just saturated with rain that had fallen on the whole roof and succumbed slowly to gravity. Snow full of water gets clear like water—ice and water have much closer indices of refraction than ice and air, hence why snow looks white and so reflectively blinding.
Coming home, I found some of what’s been falling from the sky, caught on a surface that I’d cleaned well just yesterday. Air quality has been good-enough in the interim, so I scooped a bit up to chew on. The texture is a bit like a snow cone, but different—snowcones are strips cut like wood-shavings or shards like from a rock-crusher, but these are all perfect little spheres. The texture of myriad ice spheres moving against one another is subtly but distinctly different from other shapes, as I would have expected if I’d tried to guess first.