The destruction caused by the ice storm was shocking and yet beautiful. Tree limbs and wires torn from their sockets glistened in a coating of diamond clear ice. Street after street was transformed by destruction that was at once horrible and beautiful.
The whole scene brought to mind a story I read many years ago, Sherwood Anderson’s, A Death in the Woods. The narrator recalls the shocking discovery of a woman’s half naked body found it the woods when he was a boy. In time the identity of the woman would be revealed, and the details of her life would be more troubling and tragic than the suspected natural cause of her death. The narrator would note that in spite of her middle age her body with “the snow, clinging to the frozen flesh . . . made it look so white and lovely, so like marble.” He remembers that her “shoulders were so narrow and the body so slight that in death it looked like the body of some charming young girl.”
These were the passages that stirred inside me. After all these years I am still contemplating how the pallor of death in certain instances (maybe for just a second) can appear lovely. That’s how it is here . . . mortally wounded trees looking strangely lovely.
I haven’t included images of those trees. Instead I have some pictures of my yard art suspended in ice. I don’t usually leave the trophy people out over the winter, but I am glad I did.
Now we wait. In 1892 Claude Monet created a series of paintings recording the thawing of the river Seine. The "La Debacle" was dramatic with its forceful sounds. There were reports that the sounds of the thawing ice were heard thirty miles away from the river.
I am anticipating that we will experience noisy sensations from thawing and falling ice. Even now when the wind blows the ice creaks and the branches groan. It is alarming and beautiful.
