It all began Sunday morning... well I guess truly Saturday night. All through the night it was raining (a cold sullen freezing rain) and Josiah was kept awake by strange flashes and sudden cracks and crashes. In the morning when we woke, it was to a changed and strikingly beautiful world.
Beautiful, but painfully so. Everything was coated with a 1/4 inch or so of ice, with icicles hanging off everything. Lovely to look at, but treacherously dangerous. Our willow tree had received the most damage, cracking huge limbs, some plunging below to the ground, others stuck up on our power line. At this point we still had power, surprisingly enough, yet because of the roads and others being without power, there was to be no church service for the day. We planned to watch a video by R.C Sproul, but before that I ran outside to let the ducks out and to take pictures of the shimmering world.
Two little Chickadees hung on bravely to the ice covered clothes line, shifting their tiny little feet and yelling at me for food. The snow crunched ominously as I tried to avoid the slick pathways.
Faith had been out earlier and had brought up some delicate "birds nests" (Queen Ann's Lace); they too were coated with ice.
Everything was: our garden ornaments,
all of the fencing,
the clotheslines and a few stray clothespins that were forgotten,
the rose hips on the wild rose bushes out back,
and all the other bushes and trees leaning over the pathway, all weighed down by the frozen water that encased them.
After returning to the house we all trooped down stairs to have our own service together. We began by singing a few hymns, and had fun selecting our favorites. We had just finished the first song and were choosing the next when "blink, blink" the power flickered, struggled, then came back on. Undaunted we began the second hymn, and midway in the second verse, "blip" then "thunk" we were officially "OUT".
~Chs
