One last album of ice — now covered under a thick blanket of snow.

The ground heaved from all the freezing and thawing and freezing and thawing — thawing: water in the ground. Freezing: the water expands taking the ground up with it.  Freezing some more and then thawing, if you get it just right, leaves the ground up there by as much as four inches with the ice gone — sort of like the lost wax process used in casting sculptures and delicate parts. We’ll call it the lost water process. Or, when I stepped into the twenty-fourth of these and custard so loudly and indelicately that even the dog came running to see what was up, “effing Agatha-traps!”

But they are pretty neat to look at, these holes, so I kneeled down with the camera after carefully making sure the hound was not around to jolly me into it, bent forward, camera extended, . . .  and continued toppling forward with the momentum of the small nylon backpack that slid smoothly on my jacket and up over my head.

Take it from me, there are no elegant solutions to curiosity. Instead, check the images. If your internet is as slow as mine, they take a few seconds to become clear.