It rained most of the night, but the temperature dropped in the morning and encased the city in ice. It was treacherous but beautiful.
After scraping the ice from our front steps and salting the sidewalk (with a supposedly environmentally benign form of salt), I ran to the nearest forest.
The trees were pale and frozen. The rocks (Manhattan schist, which coincidentally turned 450 millions years old today) glistened.
Looking up at the Highbridge Water Tower, I felt like I had arrived in a magical world of quests and wizards. (And not of video calls and automated customer service.)
The frozen vines on the hill reminded me of the kudzu on the cover of R.E.M.s first album ‘Murmur,’ which was my favorite record in tenth grade. I spent a lot of time looking at that photograph, but it never occurred to me that I would remember it decades later while running through an ice storm in Washington Heights.
The red berries symbolized these memories.
The High Bridge took me across the river, giving me a perfect view of where I had been.
