Water is magic. It conforms in shape to everything it meets thus allowing for the popsicle and the shower. It runs downhill to flood your basement and to create electricity. Water destroys everything in its path eventually. Deserts are created by water.

Most water action is by quick or patient erosion: water pushing and pushing and pushing until the other substance gives. Ice is the immediate destroyer of life: it explodes cell walls because water expands big time in building ice crystals. Little bombs that’ll blow up your basil plants. (Also don’t crunch ice cubes, that will destroy your teeth – but that’s another story.)

No basil plants now, it’s in the single digits outside and the wind is howling. The ice is in and I can’t stop looking at it. Man and dog gaze longingly towards where they know the warm house must be, fingers and noses numb, and still I’m on my haunches trying to see it this way and that. Get the light on the all the minuscule scaffolding just so.

There’s a lot of ice on this blog, most of it from last winter when we had as much time to enjoy the ice as we had to enjoy the slow decay of fall this year. Yup, that’s the magic of New England. If you like the looks of ice up close, click the “ice crystals” tag.