Icicles

How luxuriant to stay abed of a morning! Nowhere to be, no one to appease, no onerous chores calling. It had been frosty and snowy for days - a Narnian winter before Aslan appears, lacking only the Turkish taffy.

I lay quietly reading - for pleasure, mind you! My heart wasn't really into it though. My mind kept drifting here and there, daydreaming about how I might help some poor child with a physical affliction, some poor orphan in desperate need, some mother struggling to battle cancer (sorry, can't help the day dreams).

I realized after awhile that I was focused on a huge icicle hanging from the roof outside my bedroom window. It was thick and rumply transparent, melting and freezing all at once. A drop of water would melt near the top where the sun struck it, begin to roll down the side of the icicle only to freeze halfway down and stick tight making all sorts of lumpy bulgy odd shapes.

When I was a kid, the manses we lived in were all older buildings without a great deal of insulation in the roof. Icicles hanging from the eaves and gutters were commonplace. One year when we were living in Johnstown a huge icicle formed on the corner of the house near my bedroom window. It was as thick around as a small child and extended from the second story roof clear to the ground.

One of the neighbor kids tried to knock it down with a baseball bat, but the icicle was so thick that it barely dented despite all the force he used. It was just as well since the sinewy arms of that ice dagger had entwined about the power lines coming into the house, and had he succeeded in shattering it, no telling what that might have done to our power supply.

Those were days of innocence and ignorance. I clearly remember licking sharp pointy icicles and crunching the skinny ones between my teeth. They had that peculiar taste of wet cardboard and driveway gravel mixed with flat soda - at once refreshing and disgusting. Of course, we ate snow back then too and thought nothing of it. Our only caveat was not to eat yellow snow. Nowadays, no one in their right mind would eat snow. No telling where its been and what it carries.

Well, no point lying here thinking about icicles. Though perhaps it does explain why my room tends to get cold. Old buildings, lacking insulation. Ah, me. I wonder if the state programs for energy efficiency include apartment complexes? Perhaps I should investigate.