Today’s the 25th. ‘Tis the month after Christmas and all through the house, not a creature is stirring, not even my spouse. Our stockings are doubled, ‘cause toes are a-frigid, with visions of springtime, and snow must be ridded.
At the end of January and throughout February, Angelkeep watches for a tiny sign of spring. Once, in this writer’s lifetime — 2012 — crocus bloomed February 6th. Crocus color brings joy after a bleak winter of white layered on neutrals of gray, charcoal, and browns, colors of a winter season in Indiana.
To get technical, white is refracted vision of all hues combined. Can you wrap your brain around that fact? Cognitive reason suggests one should consider winter the most colorful season. It tops colors of spring’s crocus and tulips. Betters a summer of 40 shades of green. Out-blisses autumn’s leaf spectacle. But, no, snow seems colorless. But it DO make the cardinals pop red, like blood-shot eyes from the cold winter blizzard winds from the frozen north.
Without the white stuff, how could the snow removal guys make a living?
Angelkeep Journals never considered highlighting a snowflake for a column feature.
“Well it’s about time,” shouts a bazillion snowflakes bashing six arms simultaneously against the thermal pane windows between Anglekeep’s great room and deserted patio.
Angelkeep introduces “Snowflake” with the guidance of Caltech Physics Professor K. G. Libbrecht, a North Dakotan native who knows flakes better than the frozen tip of Angelkeep’s nose. North Dakota sees snow abundantly. It also has abundant nicknames like Flickertail State, Sioux State, and perhaps due to so much snowfall, the Roughrider State.
Most Hoosiers recognize a snowflake when it falls as a dendrite. However most Hoosiers could not define a dendrite if the existence of the game of basketball depended on it.
A dendrite, a.k.a. snowflake, is a crystal formed from an air vapor particle that grows with six arms. In a perfect state, that technically nonexistent, each arm is exactly like the others (see your cell phone’s snowflake emoji.) The fern-like pattern of the six snowflake arms creates the “Hollywood” image, or the type of snowflake always used by advertising gimmicks trying to sell warm clothing to protect us all from all those gazillion snowflakes.
In truth, in certain situations, those snowflakes, when they congregate (aggregate a better scientific word) can kill us. Angelkeep’s cardiologist warns against fighting snowflakes with shovel, broom, and even a blower. Angelkeep pays a snow removal-ite to relocate offensive snowflakes to the edge of the driveway and walks. Heart. Smart.
Dendrites require higher humidity than stellar plates. Stellar plates, also a snowflake, appear more similar to a coffee cup saucer with a nice off-white hexagon design in the center under the cup, with six more hexagon designs circling the central image. All of the additional six show as sextuplets. They all look exactly like the other. Artists call that radial balance. Amazon Prime calls it big bucks (but with free shipping) when sold in a set of twelve matching sets.
Angelkeep calls out, “Who cares, as long as it’s Starbucks Sumatra going into the cup.”
Angelkeep put away two large wind chimes, two and three feet in length, for winter preservation. Snowflakes harm wind chime strings. Two additional wind chimes yet hang and ring in the blizzard breezes of winter since they have copper wire strings. They can’t be heard from inside. Snowflakes deaden sound as they, when in aggregate, possess an insulating capability.
That’s a slow way to introduce yet another shape and type of snowflake. Columns form in temperatures of -5 to -10 Celsius during lower humidity. Needles form. Yes they are true snowflakes that appear the shape of a needle. Some aggregate together forming side-by-side and resemble a set of wind chimes. Others appear like hexagon plumbers’ pipe connectors.
Prior to that in colder and dryer temps you can find thin plate snowflakes designed like an iron hexagon storm drain cover. Those begin as a solid plate snowflake. It is just a thin hexagon crystal, free of marks, like a six-sided coin with no design or date.
All snowflakes can have frozen droplets formed against them. It makes a dendrite look like grandma’s retro brooch. That’s called rime. Angelkeep will save rime for another time.
Rime with time is rhyme without thyme.
Mr. Daugherty is a Wells County resident who, along with his wife Gwen, enjoy their backyard and have named it “Angelkeep.”
