RARE ICE FLOWERS BLOOM ON COLD NIGHTS

Traveling northward recently, into the foothills of the Ozarks, I took special notice of the endings of the numerous little streams that come twisting down the mountains and spread out into miniature lakes or puddles as they butt up against some embankment. Frozen over with what I call china ice, with dark, low-hanging limbs draped above, they look like picture post cards showing off some of Missouri's charm.

I kept rolling along in a warm car, although I wanted to stop, get out and look at that special kind of ice once again. Perhaps I'm the only one who calls it china ice. It is so delicate and thin and has a blue-white translucence like unto the finest of china dinnerware. It breaks even more easily than dishes, for if you give it just a light touch with your heel, it will, so surprisingly, break into myriad pieces, all out of proportion to the blow you gave it. Such ice forms only over shallow water. In fact, most or all of the water in the depression underneath has become ice. When you break it there is often no water below.

Back home, next morning, I hurried over to the little stream on the east side of the park. From years of observation I know there is a little hole of water underneath a cottonwood tree that is deep enough to look black in cold winter weather and is so mysteriously situated that ice flowers will form on the frozen surface when conditions are just right. These ice flowers are not common and you are fortunate if you ever see any. That is, if you're interested in such things. I am.

These "flowers" are a form of frost on ice and they will build up in many different shapes and forms. I've seen some that look like a five petaled daisy, an irregular star, a squat mushroom or a fairy crawdad's tower.

Crystals have a way of multiplying that is different from anything else. I thought everything that grew had to be fed. Not so with inanimate crystals. My first wide-eyed experience with them was a very simple assignment in a high school class. Some super salty water was put into a glass. A stick was laid across the top of the glass from which a string was suspended to meet the water. It was set aside for a while, maybe a month. The water disappeared and salt crystals formed, climbed and clung to the string. Amazing!

It wasn't until much later in life that I became aware that ice flowers formed in much the same way only in quantum leaps of quickness and more fragile than most any other sort of crystal.

In former years I have actually taken a thin-edged scraper and tried to scoop up such an ice flower so as to have a closer look, but it shatters quicker than the china ice when only touched.

All the fantastic fern designs of frozen vapors on a super cold inside windowpane, the hoar frost curling up the base of an old goldenrod stalk and the mind-boggling shapes of snowflakes, no two alike, are enough to trap one's mind in a state of wonderment, until the next wondrous thing comes along.

Wondrous? Why, now, is the sap in tree roots beginning to stir? It is dark, cold and still down there. I lay my ear against the bark and hear no reverberations at all. Do the outside limbs send down some message that the days are now getting longer and they, the roots, had better start revving up the old sap mill. Picture little atom-sized workers down there in the dark saying, "Giddiup, Neutrons and Protons. On Positrons. On Mesons. On Neutrinos and Deuterons. To the top of the ground. To the top of the limbs. Away, away, all. Make every twig, make every leaf, every sycamore and sweet gum ball and come back down again next Fall."

REJOICE!