strange and beautiful

This is my eighth winter in New England, eleventh in the Catskills and we usually have tons of snow by now. Not this year. Not yet. And I don't miss it a bit. Digging out the car and the driveway, slipping on ice--the day to day of long winters is tedious. So I am enjoying it while it lasts. 

There were fine icicle formations in the Catskills Christmas weekend.

Usually by now the waterfall is frozen. At Christmas there were icicles behind it and along side, but it was roaring along, fueled by snowmelt from higher elevations. It's going down to 0 degrees tonight. I have a feeling next time I go it will be fully frozen.

It was odd to see icicles alongside green ferns. For some reason it made me think about Rachel Carson's The Edge of the Sea, which I read last summer. This beautiful passage is from the opening:

The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place. All through the long history of Earth it has been an area of unrest where waves have broken heavily against the land, where the tides have pressed forward over the continents, receded and then returned. For no two successive days is the shore line precisely the same. Not only do the tides advance and retreat in their eternal rhythms, but the level of the sea itself is never at rest. It rises or falls as the glaciers melt or grow, as the floor of the deep ocean basins shifts under its increasing load of sediments, or as the earth's crust along the continental margins warps up or down in adjustment to strain and tension. Today a little more land may belong to the sea, tomorrow a little less. Always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary.

I was especially interested in ice formations on the ground. I imagine they form, then partially melt, then reform.

Clusters of ice, rocks and moss. Strange and beautiful.

I'm toying with the idea of starting a nature book group one evening a month at the store. It's an area I am well-read in, and there are so many wonderful books, essays and poems available. I put out free (public domain) poems that I've made copies of, in the store, and am pleasantly surprised at how many people take them.

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

                                                               -Robert Frost

A convergence of snow, berries, branches and ferns.