microscopic ice palaces

last Tuesday, my local world was made of tundra. the photo here isn't as striking as all that delicate golden foliage was in real life last week. you'll have to imagine the way it managed to shine and glint even in the grey, flat light of wintertime noon.

six days later, a change of the clocks, a turn of the page in my calendar-book, and a good two-thirds of all that tundra has disappeared. the sound and the sparkle of wet, melted ice remind me a little bit of this April day five years ago.

but April has not arrived for us. there are not diamonds dripping from the trees--not yet. the semi-cruel dreariness of wintertime is only barely beginning to thin.

and I have been thinking about slush.

a not-solid, not-liquid, half-melted stuff, slush. sometimes cohesive enough to walk upon, other times not. sometimes accepting of your footprints, other times not.

the indeterminate, transitional nature of slush. of course this is a thought my brain would enjoy swirling around with. I'll blame Postmodernism class (not that I need anyone or anything to blame).

sometimes my brain gets gently hooked by the tiniest, strangest, half-invisible ideas. the word you used there--'engaged'--does it imply more purposefulness than makes sense to imply in this situation?

or that word we always tend to use here--'about'--what kind of connection does it really invoke, and is that connection always the same in all the alwayses where we use it? what if it isn't? what if this preposition isn't all the things we secretly want it to be?

or this word--'melt'--that I want to use as a verb in seventeen different ways right now.

melt. I am thinking about slush, melting. but the slush is not only melting--it has been melting, it was in the middle of melting, and it is unfinished with melting.

yeah. melting. a process. a thing happening to the slush. but this doesn't seem good enough. it's like there is too much between-ness to fit in-between the two extremes of unmelted snow and pure water. 'melting' is too easy a word for this. I want more words. I want words for all the gradual states of change: the warming, softening, glittering, thawing, re-crystalizing, crumbling, smushing, cracking, re-freezing, dripping, hollowing, breaking, re-thawing, slurping, sloughing, hollowing, sluicing, slipping, and slushing of slush. do the eskimos have nouns for all those moments? hm?