Winter Wonderland (With Splintered Trees)

So!  Had myself a white christmas.  How about that?  There have only been a few here in my memory.  It's seldom quite cold enough for that.  Late xmas evening it began to rain -- freezing rain.  Anyone whose been in an ice storm knows how harrowing that can be.  It's not the worst I've been in, that was about ten years ago, but you sit there watching the ice encapsulate every tree branch, every leaf, every blade of grass inside a frozen tomb.  Then it turned into a blizzard which lasted all night long. 

Snow is fine, but ice is heavy.  Branches break and trees fall.  You could hear transformers blowing throughout the city like distant cannon fire, one neighborhood going dark after another, all the while waiting for your turn.  You know when it goes, with the streets icy and so many outages, it could take days or a week for the power to come back on.  Nearly the entire city of Little Rock was made powerless on Christmas night.

Somehow my neighborhood was one of the few that was spared.  So I've been cozy warm and with miraculous electric light throughout it all.  I did slide on snow driving my sister to the airport and scratched up my fenders, and some of bushes have been uprooted, but I have little to complain about.  Many others had it far worse.  And now it's all slowly melting away.

But there is beauty to be found in the ice.  The following morning I went outside to see the rising sun shining through the icy branches, a forest glittering as if made of crystal glass, all white and silver.  Not bad!