Winter Storms

The world is dressed in diamonds.  The branches of the bald cypress are draped one to another with sparkling gossamer hairs, glistening like spiderwebs in the dew. Leaf buds are encased in transparent  mirrors, glinting coded signals in the sunlight.

 Nothing looks made of what it is. Earth, wood, water, even the coil of old fencing wire - today it is all blown glass, silver, and cut crystals. Light flashes in every clearest color from frozen prisms in the tree tops. It’s like stepping into a fairytale set dressed by artists of the finest skill and imagination, but it’s real, and dangerous, and so much more perfect.

​What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter's day?

- A Winter Walk, Henry David Thoreau

The woods are alive with finches, darting through the undergrowth in search of enough food to keep them warm for a few more hours, then the next few after that. How fragile they seem, and tenuous. The wind, like the landscape, is laced with frozen shards, sharp and sparkling and wildly cold.
​

​... you must have seen them  
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust--
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

 - The Birches, Robert Frost

Our lone duck swims in contented circles against the pond's low current, though the cold has set icicles dropping from her feathers.  From a frozen branch hangs the ice-crusted chrysalis of a promethea silkmoth.  Deep within a curl of leaves, secured with sturdy threads, encased in coldest glass, sleeps a tiny worm, dreaming of unfurled accordion wings.
​​

​Everything in nature called destruction must be creation - a change from beauty to beauty.

- My First Summer in the Sierra, ​ John Muir
​

With a series of cracks and a thunder a tree splits under the weight of the ice, and tumbles down the hill, pulling branches and brush with it.  The wind blows a palmful of glitter against our cherry faces, then darts around to tug at cold ears and dust my hair with dampening sparks. The sunlight turns its flashing eyes towards the hilltops, then the white rooftops, then gazes back across the glinting pastures, scattering rainbow lights between each cloud wisp blink.  And we, we smile at the smoke that curls from the chimney of a powerless house, and continue our wander through this world of shattered diamonds.
​

​

​In some dark room, flame lit and
vignetted, our hands would wrap
around one another, our breath
would rise, a candle would dance
on the walls we'd call home.

Love, would remain.

-Tyler Knott Gregson