Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Friday, December 9, 2005

This morning, Frank, Henry and I awoke to the “winter wonderland” here in Mount Airy that we’ve been hearing about the past several weeks in that famous Christmas song. The trees in the little park across the street from our condo were rimmed with ice from rain that froze in the night. How beautiful the world is, I thought, when sheathed in ice—when clothed in wintry garb. And how warm and intimate is our living space on such a morning, our little nest at Renfro Lofts.

After a two-hour delay of school’s starting, Frank drove Henry to school—where Henry bought a book at the Book Fair—and I swam at Reeves, glad that the pool water was not ice.

Backlit by the sun, icy trees already were beginning to thaw a little, droplets of water dripping from glistening boughs, as I came into the office. Soon the ice will be gone, assuming another form in the eternal journey of water that Henry has been learning about in school. Such beauty is transitory in our corner of the South, to be placed by other forms of winter beauty until the ice returns and puts on its dazzling, here-today-gone-tomorrow ice show once more.