I step outside and take a breath, half expecting to see it crystallize before me as I exhale, but my attention quickly shifts to the tree at my right. Its dead bear limbs are moving in an unfelt breeze, their movements heavily subdued by the weight that they now bear. This is no gentle spring sway. No, I listen as its swaying, drooped branches produce a sound not unlike countless wads of paper being crinkled.

“Strange,” I think to myself, “I’ve never heard that sound come from a tree before.”

I continue to watch it for a few more minutes as I wonder if its about to fall to pieces, and then I gingerly step off of my back porch and onto the several inches of ice that now coats my back yard.

When one sees a world covered in white they expect their feet to meet something soft, or at least for their weight to crunch through the wintry covering beneath their feet. Neither happens. My feet meet a surface that is as hard as any concrete. Step after step meets the same hard, frozen surface, and then I find myself standing in the middle of the yard.

I take in my surroundings. Despite it being 2:00 in the morning I am able to see perfectly fine. The ice that covers everything gives the world the look of a subdued dawn, though the sun won’t actually rise until about three hours from now.

“Wow.” I can’t help but say it out loud. The sleet has been coating our little world for a few days now with an almost vengeful tenacity, and there’s nothing that’s been left untouched. This is not a sight from our world. This is what you expect to see in the (now sadly melting) areas of the North Pole, or perhaps Antarctica. Not South-East Kansas.

Yet I know that we haven’t received the worse of it. A town within a driving distance of less than two hours has been declared a local disaster area. Yeah… I guess we’ve still managed to get away easy despite the layers of ice that now seem to cover everything.

The wind is like something from straight out of a movie scene. You hear it for a few seconds before you feel it, and its moan is a low, steady sound that is both hollow and uncaring. It’s damn eerie to listen to. First it plays with the tops of the trees, recreating another chorus of crinkling paper and the occasional whine of sad, heavy limbs. Then it passes over you and bites into the tender areas of your exposed ears and neck.

I stand there for a moment and look at the sky. The ice is reflecting both the moon light… or what there is of it… and the man made light, resulting in a dome that has a subdued blue tint to it.

The entire setting is simply surreal.

Then I turn and begin to walk back toward the house, but before I reach the porch I stop and look to my right at the trees just a few houses away. Like everything else, it’s a picturesque scene with their jagged slumped forms hanging against the sky. The wind is moving them, and from their frozen limbs come the sound of what I can only relate as countless bamboo sticks slapping together.

“Wow.” I repeat after taking a breath, then I continue shambling back across this concrete layer of ice to the warmth of the house.

It still amazes me that we manage to maintain power. I’m glad for it, even though I don’t know how we’ve managed to do it. There is no snow to the inch upon inch of white that now covers our world. It’s purely ice, and please pardon the obvious, but it’s really damn cold. We’ve been blessed with a working heater while many others have had to seek public shelters.

Another observation that I couldn’t help but make is that a very large, very dead tree was removed not too long ago from the neighbor’s yard. This tree hung well over our yard and even lost a large branch on top of one of our vehicles. I can only imagine how its wooden husk would have fell to so many pieces under these conditions, and though I mourned the loss of the various homes that it no doubt gave to animals I can’t help but now be kind of thankful for its absence.

So here I now sit in my very warm bedroom as I try to retell the experience from moments ago in my back yard. It’s really something out there.

Yes, I would love to share pictures of it, but I would also love to own a camera with which to take those photos. I don’t.

Update: We finally received a light dusting of snow this morning. Probably at around 6:00 AM.

~Steph