Yesterday morning when I was setting the trash out, it was sunny and 17 degrees, warm compared to our recent single-digit highs and subzero lows. I dragged my box down the driveway, focused on not wiping out on ice and ending up in a snow drift, so it took me a bit before I realized that the oaks and spruces, the sumac, my tiny maple tree we planted the summer we moved here--everything--shimmered in the sunlight against the blue sky, covered with a fine, fine glaze of frost. Freezing fog. It moves through some mornings in winter, gently icing over whatever it touches.
At the end of the driveway I left my trash and continued down the road. It's a hilly, winding country road, five or six houses on a three-mile loop, gravel in the summer, but now it's smooth snow pack with shoulder-high piles of plowed snow on either side. Usually I watch the ground when I walk, because I look for interesting rocks and pebbles, and I'm learning to spot different animal track, so I can tell who walked the road before me. But yesterday I stumbled along in wonder with my head tipped back, looking up at the trees, out at the landscape. Everything I saw glistened crystal against blue. A cow lowed, a field of unharvested corn shook-crackled in the breeze.
I ended up a mile away. To my right the Missouri snaked slate in the snow-white valley, running briskly, moving floes of ice downstream. Beyond the river farm land sprawled albescent, fog still working, a windbreak of trees flocked with ice, a silvery silo beyond. As I turned to come home, the wind picked up and my face was cold. I thought of Phoenix, of an outdoor table at the Duck on a 70-degree winter day. Then tiny pieces of ice broke from the trees tumbling above until the wind eased and they shimmered to the ground all around me.
