Hoar Frost

Yesterday, I woke up in the night: Aubrey was awake. She's afraid of the dark lately. While I was helping her get back into bed, I noticed there was a kind of glow coming in through the window. I walked over to see where the strange light was coming from. On the other side of the glass, there was a thick, soupy fog enveloping the world. The light from the streetlights struggled to break through the haze but instead just put off on eerie, yellowish glow.

Later in the morning, I looked out the window again. The fog hadn't lifted yet. It had settled there, low on the ground, like it was planning on making a home in our neighborhood. The feeling of the morning was muffled by the large ominous cloud lying on our lawn. The kids didn't want to get ready, I wasn't motivated either. We all felt stagnant like the air outside.

Finally, after a few hours the fog lifted. The light coming in the house changed from a sickly, yellow-gray to a bright, clean white. I approached the window again, wondering what I would see this time. I was surprised again.

The beauty that I saw on the other side of glass was in such stark contrast to the bleak view that had greeted me earlier that I sharply inhaled. I stood there transfixed for a moment. Every branch on every tree, every blade of grass, even the plastic slide in the backyard was covered in fuzzy crystals.

I realized that as fleeting as the fog had been, this new landscape would be too. As the sun warmed the day, slowly, each crystal would melt and fall from it's branch in a drop of water.


But I was grateful that it had been there at all. It was the desolate, suffocating fog that had made the piercing beauty of the hoar frost possible. Because of the beauty of the outcome, I was glad even for it's predecessor.