First the freezing rain fell and the world turned to glass until the temperature climbed just enough and the ice became rain, just rain, torrential and unrelenting for hour upon hour under heavy iron skies until the thermometer dropped back down and the rain froze again and the snow soon followed with jaw-dropping ambition, the inches quickly piling up, nature flexing its heavy muscles, and then the limbs began cracking and falling, in the distance and closer in, the thuds and the shuddering, the ripped power lines, the blocked roads and broken eaves, the descending darkness and the creeping chill, and next morning the icy spectacular trees, the surviving ones, preening and glistening in the sun.
