David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Year of the Icicle

This is the year of the roofline icicle.  We’re used to seeing thick crystalline columns and cauliflower mounds of ice on highway rock cuts where groundwater seeps and freezes along the exposed stone, or  
at river rapids where the current’s spray can form bizarre sculptures on boulders and overhanging branches.  But when it comes to the common spike-shaped roofline icicle that hangs from shingle edges and gutters, not even local octogenarians remember a better winter.

Graffiti, Buildings, and Time's Passage

It was inevitable he would pose the question.  My son Josh is college-bound in the fall and when to my surprise he expressed interest in my alma mater, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, I gladly took him for a visit.  We weren’t there long before he dished up the expected query.  “What was it like  when you were here?”  Reaching back over thirty-five years, I reminisced about buildings old and new, my work for the commissary, courses on astronomy and seventeenth century British literature, bell bottom jeans and paisley shirts, country rock, and the anger and upset as the Vietnam War convulsed to  conclusion.  But with memories growing thin, I took him to a place in the center of town that might conjure more.

On the redbrick wall of the Amherst Cinema Building on Amity Street are scrawled two phrases in white paint.  “Save the Drake,” reads one.  “For Willy, for Humanity!” reads the other.  Graffiti is typically a statement of the moment whose meaning dims faster than the paint.  Often it gets covered over or slowly fades like an urban ghost sign.  But strangely, these barely washed out words have persisted since at least the late 1990s.

Skating on Hibernal Pools

As soon as cold weather sets in for good with a few hard freezing days you see them popping up in back  yards and front lawns, on town greens and in public parks.  Temporary ice ponds are more fun than indoor skating rinks sealed off from the sky with their loud music echoing off the walls, and more reliably smooth and frozen than the local river or pond which may have tricky thin spots and detritus embedded in the surface.

Like nature’s vernal pools of spring whose fishless waters are a haven for the growth of amphibians and insects, these hibernal pools have their own special ecology.  They are a nursery of young future figure skaters and hockey players, an epicenter of simple, stress shedding fun.  They are frozen, still-water fountains of youth for those getting on in years.  Perhaps Ponce De Leon would have explored more northern climes had he known of the age ameliorating affects of skating.