The Thaw
01/30/2014
It's a bright sunny day, the temperature is a few degrees above freezing, and I'm hearing something I've only heard a few times in my life. The sound of the thaw: water running off the eaves, dripping from the trees, and here and there a more substantial sound as a bit of ice crumbles and falls. Apart from the last of these, it sounds more or less like the aftermath of an ordinary rain, but the cold makes it feel much different. I'd forgotten what a pleasure it is; a bit of compensation for those who live in colder places.
Yes, I woke up the other morning and wondered what this noise was. I've never heard it before in my life. How weird that I would experience it in Houston!!!
Posted by: Louise | 01/30/2014 at 01:07 PM
Yeah, pretty funny--not just a warm climate but a notoriously hot and uncomfortable one. Imagine how nice that sound would be at the end of a serious winter.
Posted by: Mac | 01/30/2014 at 02:25 PM
When I lived in Boston, I became aware of the danger of falling icicles -- they grew mighty big up there. Had to always look up first before going out the door.
Posted by: Marianne | 01/30/2014 at 02:26 PM
Never thought of them as being actually dangerous.
Posted by: Mac | 01/30/2014 at 02:50 PM
I guess they get pretty pointy and big. :o
The thawing sound would indeed be very nice at the end of a big winter.
Posted by: Louise | 01/30/2014 at 05:11 PM
There is a famous sequence of Peanuts cartoons in which Snoopy is trapped in his doghouse because a huge icicle had formed over it. He is trapped in fear for several panels, then escapes in the nick of time because Charlie Brown coaxes him out with a pizza.
http://peanuts.wikia.com/wiki/Snoopy's_doghouse?file=Pe600213.gif
Posted by: Robert Gotcher | 01/31/2014 at 08:56 AM
I think it's great the way people construct these very detailed encyclopedic repositories of information about comics and similar things.
Posted by: Mac | 01/31/2014 at 09:33 PM
I was a Peanuts fanatic as a kid.
Posted by: Robert Gotcher | 01/31/2014 at 09:50 PM
Oh. You're talking about the web page. I always wonder how people have that kind of time.
Posted by: Robert Gotcher | 01/31/2014 at 09:51 PM
"...a bit of compensation for those who live in colder places."
Oh, we get all sorts of compensation: the way the sunlight sparkles on the snow like tiny diamonds, the silence when it is still and big snowflakes are drifting earthward, a world reduced to black and white and blue, etc. But our greatest compensation is only occasionally having humid days that are over 90 degrees instead of a whole summer of such.
Posted by: Daniel Nichols | 02/01/2014 at 05:45 AM
It rarely got over 90 for very long last summer, which I guess was a harbinger of the unusual winter.
"...how people have that kind of time..." Yeah, I always wonder that, too. I'm glad they do it--nice for the rest of us.
Posted by: Mac | 02/01/2014 at 08:21 AM
That is odd; I lived way up north in Virginia years back and I remember endless 90s with 90% humidity or so. And no air conditioning. AND I was way younger...
Posted by: Daniel Nichols | 02/01/2014 at 05:20 PM
Oh yeah, it was definitely unusually cool, also unusually wet. Part of the reason most of my grass died, I think.
Posted by: Mac | 02/01/2014 at 09:07 PM