Icy Blues

The cold persistently steel gray sky dampened my spirits when I woke up today. I thought of Zephine Humphrey, in Winterwise, referring to a similar day eighty years ago as "iron-clad and relentless." The landscape is desperate for a fresh whitewash of snow and the few flurries that came down later this afternoon were nice, but didn't spruce up the stark trees and the hard, compacted old snow on the ground. Paul and I usually keep the firing going in the front room and drink lots of tea on days like this, but he had to drive to the college where he teaches, an hour an a half away, for a meeting and then back. I brooded over an editing job I'm working on and went to town in the afternoon to meet a friend and her five-year old daughter outside of her school, which also happens to be next to a large wooded preserve with trails.

The three of us, along with Nokie of course, took a walk out to the ice pond where ice used to be cut in blocks for refrigeration purposes in the nineteenth century, and where there had been a recent ice-cutting demonstration using vintage tools.

The large blocks of cut-out ice had been placed in a circle.They looked like a fantastic ice installation as the large, irregular-shaped blocks were frozen to the surface of the pond. In the center of the circle was thin, cracked ice through which the dark pond could be seen. Anyone stepping inside the ice-block circle would fall through immediately. Happily, that wasn't a temptation. It was unusually cold and my fingertips were numb even through my gloves. Her daughter was delighted with the ice-sculptures and played around them and "skated" alongside them in her pink snowshoes. My friend had generously made cookies and hot chocolate, so we sat by the pond and enjoyed the snack before we all headed back down the trail. 

Her daughter, with rosy cheeks and robust, lively energy, did not walk on the trail so much as push her way through the greenery alongside of it. Her mother said that underneath her blue snowsuit she was wearing red because she wanted to be a fox. So I imagined she was stalking her way toward her prey. The woods were getting colder and darker by the moment, particularly, as my friend noted, as we passed under the evergreens. The sky, to me, looked even more whitish-gray and ominous than it had before. 

As if reading my gloomy thoughts, her daughter looked up at the spaces between the bare branches of trees and said, "I like the color of the sky." 
  
"What color is it?" I said.

"Violet," she said. And through her enthusiastic perspective, I could thankfully see just what she meant.