Harbingers of Spring

I wrote this post in February. It sat in my box for a while waiting for me to get to the crust part, but I've moved on to other metaphors now that spring is here! So, I'll just post my musings on icicles, rather belatedly.


Two metaphors have been skirting around the edge of my thoughts these days – icicles and crusts. February is the month of icicles here in northern New England. Old colonial houses with steeply pitched roofs abound, and the snowfall this year has been generous. For weeks snow piles up on the roofs and in the gutters, biding its time till a sunny day. February’s skies are bright blue after January’s gun metal expanse, and the snow begins to soften and then to drip. The sun is deceptively warm, but the air is still cold. The combination makes for icicles which lengthen during the sunny days and harden in the cold, dark nights.

Some roofs look like they have grown sharp fangs overnight, the rows of closely spaced icicles fringing the roof like shark’s teeth. Others are more elegant and assymetrical, long, thick sharp sabres alternating with shorter, more delicate points. My children love to watch the roof across the street and make forays into the yard when the owner is not home to harvest her icicles. Sometimes they have short lived sword fights with them, more often they bring them home to the freezer to try to extend their natural life span. They coexist in the dark with bags of peas and ice cream cartons until someone, usually me, tosses them out to break on the porch.

Suddenly in February the public signs which have been ignored all summer and fall – Caution, Falling Ice- begin to have portent. Parking too near the edge of a building could have serious consequences during February. We park, drive and walk at our own risk during these bright days which lure us outside. Icicles are at once the harbingers of spring and the reminders that winter is not over.

Some days I feel like an icicle. I can melt, or be melted, by the misfortune of others, by the needs I encounter all around me, by a friend’s pain or a husband’s struggle, but my heart can harden again just as easily. I wish for it to be always spring in my heart, but I am stuck in February, I fear. I weep, but then I forget what I’ve seen, I feel touched by the feeling of another’s infirmity, but I don’t stay soft; I slip back into the icy shadows of my own wants and needs and cares, the cold darkness of my own night. My heart so easily hardens toward others and I am sharp and brittle and frozen solid. The cycle of melting, hardening, melting and hardening seems to go on forever. I know when I look at the calendar that sometime soon the icicles will melt away for good, that mud season will inevitably overtake winter. But when I look at my heart I cannot predict spring so infallibly. Though I ache for spring, though I drip in anticipation, winter could be here for a long time. For good if I let it.