My mother once created a piece of performance art but neither of us would have known to call it that sixty years ago. She hung laundry outdoors year round in our southwestern Ontario town and in the winter it was not uncommon to bring the garments indoors, frozen, at the end of the day and have them finish drying on indoor clothes racks. The clean, fresh, windblown fragrance was wonderful. One time, as she unpinned a stiff towel from the line and folded it to make it a more compact bundle to hand to me to put into the laundry basket, it cracked into several pieces. The sound was amazingly loud. She had a sense of humour and flair for drama; she handed me the shattered towel and then she bowed.
This cold snap made me think of this and I wanted to make use of the below zero temperature.
I changed the script. Would a piece of paper, crumbled into satisfying folds, wetted with water, put outdoors, left until frozen, and then – scrunched ….. would it break into pieces with a satisfying sound …..
It froze all right.
It crumbled up a bit when scrunched but it did not become a jig saw of its former self nor did it make any satisfying sound. It did, however, clank quite nicely when I tossed it back onto the stool. Not impressive enough for a bow: I made a small curtsey.
The other experiment involved my memory of Ontario icicles. We do not do icicles well here on the west coast.
But it was below zero and surely….. surely ….
So I hung a dripping wet dish cloth outdoors.
I don't suppose a frozen drop of water could at all be considered an icicle.
Sigh and shrug.
A dripping eaves trough is obviously needed. Nary a one in sight.
I did notice about a four inch icicle hanging from the mud flap of my car when I returned to it in the library parking lot this afternoon (yes, driving conditions vastly improved since yesterday). Yippee. You'll have to take my word for it. Lying prone to record it with camera would likely have even daunted my mother.