These photos show what I think is beautiful about ice storms. There's something mesmerizing about the glistening ice-coated tree branches here in my forested city.
Of course, ice storms are known primarily for the headaches they cause: that beautiful ice can sometimes accumulate to a greater weight than many trees can support. Fortunately, the one we had here this past week was not all that bad in terms of tree damage and power outages. Just last year we had one that was quite a bit worse: somehow I was spared a loss of electricity at my house, but the neighborhood where my rental property is lost power for close to a week.
And then there was the truly catastrophic storm in February of 1994. I remember waking up thinking my neighborhood was being shelled as the branches of large trees cracked off and crashed onto roofs everywhere. I think it took the better part of a month for our local utility to get power fully restored to its customers. I was a high school teacher at the time, and school was out for a week. That might have been nice at the moment, but we paid a steep price later: the school board, in its profound wisdom, decided to make up the missed time by extending the school day an hour for the entire month of April. Each class period was lengthened from 55 minutes to 65, and considering that I could barely hold those students' attention for even 20 minutes, it's little surprise that that was the most painful month of my teaching career.
We also had a very bad storm back in the early 1970s. I remember considerable tree damage and long power outages, but I don't remember caring all that much about it. I think my main source of anguish was that the ice wasn't as much fun to play in as snow. Meanwhile, school was out, and I didn't really mind the heat going off in our house because we got to have fires in the fireplace along with hot chocolate and all that stuff.
Oh, to be a kid again, with no particular worldly worries.
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