This morning I took a hammer to the bird bath. I started with a wooden spoon to break the ice and let a robin drink, but the ice wasn’t a crackable layer as it had been before; it was solid, bubbles suspended below the frozen surface. I used a hammer to break up the ice so I could empty and refill it. The garden was festooned with huge cobwebs I’d never noticed before. Now they were picked out in ice, they were everywhere, stretched between branches, draped like deflated parachutes over the half dead branches of the climbing honeysuckle that never blooms.
I went for a walk past parked cars thick with white, down through the lane to the woods. There were still blackberries dried and shriveled on the brambles, coated with frost. The ground was solid, lumpy, mud dried into peaks, ice rimmed grass crunching underfoot. All the edges were white, the details of leaves, branches, dying buds. I turned into the woods, where the frost thinned as the trees thickened, till it was only my breath that was white. When I came to an open field, the mist made everything still. Hardly any birds called; all was cloudy, suspended. In the not-so-distant distance I saw two figures, a parent and child, walking into nothingness. I was still in the whiteness for a while before I turned back, to the green and red woods, the wet leaves and then, as I got back to suburban streets, the spider webs stretched across fences and wheelie bins.
Bonnie Radcliffe 