Ice crystals on palms
Tinkling shards of clear glass
Dropping from the sky

Thank you Clare at My Creative Cosmos for inviting me to join this wonderful challenge.

This photo was taken January 29, 2014.

Yes, I live in Florida; Northwest Florida. What most people don’t realize is the we get our share of cold weather. Not Maine cold (I lived there for almost four years) but cold enough to freeze pipes, harm animals left outside and kill the tropical plants people insist on planting in our non-tropical climate. We typically dip below freezing for a week or three every year. If we get down in the teens for more than a few days we are basically screwed. The pipes here are only buried about six inches underground so they freeze under these conditions. On top of that, my house is on pilings so my pipes are exposed to the cold on their way from the ground to the house. They are insulated, heat wrapped and I leave water running but sometimes even that is not enough. The problem with pipe splits are that you don’t know it has happened until the thaw -and God help you if you are not home when the ice plug finally thaws and the split lets itself be known. Nothing makes my stomach drop quite like hearing that distinctive “pop” followed by a continuous “hiss”. Due to our weather patterns, the cold arctic air that sometimes dips down into our region is usually dry so we rarely get snow. Once in a while you will see some flakes in the air that melt the minute they hit the ground. More commonly we get ice but that is normally a night time re-freeze of past rain. On this particular day we had a full-blown ice storm. It was dangerously beautiful. The real hazard was happening out on the roads. Locals were absolutely freaking out. They acted like they had never seen ice before. I was lucky enough to have my employer tell me to stay home until the roads were safe but many folks felt compelled to try to get to work. Being from the Northeast, I know how to drive under very bad conditions. I also know there is nothing you can do to safely navigate glaze ice, especially in an area that has absolutely no clue or resources to handle it. So I stayed home and safely documented the beauty with photos. Later that night for entertainment I watched the local news ice induced demolition derby stories and all I could think was, “Calm the fuck down you crazy Floridians. This is what happens when you combine precipitation and freezing temperatures. Stay home”.

OK, here is where I am going rogue. I am not going to follow the strict rules and pay it forward to five other folks. An elaborate explanation of why can be found on my Five Photos, Five Stories – Day One: Fog post if you care to read my obnoxious rant.  Here are my rules: If I follow you, I admire and respect your work. If you would like to take on this challenge, please do so as I would very much like to follow what you create. I will be posting three more of these photos, haiku and stories guilt free with the hope of inspiring someone else to take a shot at it. If you take on the challenge and want to follow the original rules, I think that is great so here are what the rules are supposed to be:

The Five Photos, Five Stories Challenge rules require you to post a photo each day for five consecutive days and attach a story to the photo. It can be fiction or non-fiction, a poem or simply a short paragraph – it’s entirely up to you.

Then each day, nominate another blogger to carry on this challenge.

Accepting the challenge is entirely up to the person nominated, it is not a command. Today, I invite (insert nominee here) to join the challenge.

I would like to give a special “Thanks” to all of the wonderful bloggers that follow and support me and especially to Clare for being so patient with me.

This is also a response to the Weekly Photo Challenge: Forces of Nature which inspired a theme for my five day challenge and will be incorporated in each of the five posts.