Rainbow Ice

I can't tell you how many times it has happened like this, but it's been often. I get up in the morning, I take a look at the forecast, and I run out to take my walk before it precipitates. Well, I didn't beat the rain on this morning, in spite of my rushing. It caught me about a half-hour into my hour's walk, up to the Scotia Barrens.

It's been raining, and melting, and I was there to check out the progress of things at several of my favorite little ponds. There are three that I favor: the first little pond that is the absolute favorite, the nearby larger one surrounded by bunny poo (bunny poo pond!), and then the larger one, further up along the trail.

The pathway was terrible, as per usual. How can it possibly be worse every time, when the weather is so variable? The middle path down the trail was lumpy with knobby ice, and covered in melt water and a bit of rain. It was, as they say sometimes around here, "slicker than owl sh*t." (Not that I'm any sort of expert, you know.) You must pick your steps along the outside of that treacherous ice.

But then I was up at the bigger pond, and I was photographing the circles made by bubbles in the ice, and feeling like quite the artiste for doing all of that. (Kandinsky! Calling Kandinsky! Is Kandinsky here? Or Klee, his back-up?)

And I was hunkering by the edge of the pond, kneeling down, and I had my camera and I was just sort of running it along the edge, seeing what things looked like. When suddenly, all of these COLORS popped out at me! And textures too! I took about a dozen abstracts of the rainbows in the ice.

The effect of the colors is from the ice refracting the items below and inside the ice: leaves, moss, a twig, more leaves. We've got green there, and pink, and some oranges and maroons and purples too, I think. What marvelous colors, and how did they get here? And then I suddenly understood!

I flashed back to last springtime, and the day of the three miracles at the vernal ponds, and I remembered, and it all made sense. THIS is the pond where the rainbow mist was refracting the colors on that March morning, and magic happened; where the newts walked on water. THIS is the pond with rainbows floating on top of it (the second picture in the extras, here). And now in winter, the rainbows are frozen in!

My soundtrack song can only be this one: Cyndi Lauper, with True Colors.