Ice

It is bone-chillingly cold here, and if you’ve never lived in a cold clime and don’t know what that means, or if you’ve moved away and forgotten, it means this: as you walk down the street, your nose hairs freeze. You become aware of the bones in your feet. It can actually hurt to breathe. Anything down to 20 degrees is just cold; below 20, it’s really cold, and you constantly feel the heat being sucked from your body. Even inside, in a nicely insulated house, you feel the effect of constantly losing heat. Stepping outside, you are instantly aware of exactly where air can reach skin.

There is a particular sound that comes with this kind of below-zero cold, too. The ground is hard and your feet creak as they walk on it. Your jacket hardens. The sound of cars is muffled. There is a certain hush to this kind of cold. There is no wind and, ironically, it is brilliantly sunny, which is the only thing that makes it bearable. The snow cover is packed and hard, and the ice on the driveway is there for the duration.

I went for a snowshoe hike in the woods on Sunday . . . the quickest way to overheat in these temperatures is to snowshoe in full winter regalia. It wasn’t long before my hat was off and my jacket open. Even in this cold, the snow was giving under my snowshoes, and in the deep woods it was a slog. There was a little streambed, and here and there, seen through holes in the snow, there was still water running underneath. There were crystals, gigantic crystals like ornamental snowflakes, in the streambed where little bits of water had frozen. It was intensely beautiful. And there wasn’t a sound.