What Ice Teaches

Image from @nativeinnashville 1/26/26

My daily calendar tells me time stopped last week. The flu arrived with its fever and its cough, pinning me to bed while an ice storm swept across the country, coating everything in a crystalline shell. I am upright now, but not quite right. The post-viral rash, the lingering weakness, my body still working its way through what invaded it while snow continues to give us all permission to stay small, stay close, stay under blankets.

December sits in my rearview mirror, foggy. If I’m honest, the entire last quarter of 2025 feels like a fever dream. On December 31st, I closed my laptop uncertain how writing would look in 2026. That year was about discipline, about showing up daily to explore this persistent idea that I needed to write. Amid personal and national grief, I can now say with certainty: the idea has been confirmed. I am a writer. Even when I’m not typing, I am writing.

When I walk, I am writing. When I sit at the dining table listening to a challenging conversation with loved ones, I am writing. The material swirls around me like a gentle tornado…words, phrases, images collecting. But this month’s collection feels tangled, too much, like trying to find a single thread in a snarl. Daily writing acts like the detangler I once used on my young daughters’ hair, keeping life from knotting around me. I know it’s time to return to my practice, time to start the untangling.

This morning, the thread I’m pulling leads to images from Tennessee, photographs from the unprecedented ice storm that invaded much of the country last week. One shows a ruler pressed against a tree branch, measuring the thickness of the ice glaze. The number isn’t large, but in ice degrees, it is devastating.

I have been sitting with these images. Trees broken. Ancient oaks bent over, enormous sentinels that have stood for centuries, trees that swayed and yielded to hurricanes, tornadoes, the violent winds of thunderstorms, now demonstrating their limits. Their strength, snapped. Their forms frozen in place, eerily still, as if the ice wanted us to witness what it’s capable of doing. There will be cleanup for months. Trees removed, old wood mulched, new saplings planted where the fallen once stood. No one will forget this storm. No one will forget what ice can do.

The images are beautiful to me. A demonstration of power and limit, held in transparency for us to reflect upon.

In my own front yard, the daffodils that had pushed six inches out of the ground before the storm arrived now lie under packed ice and snow. I know this won’t kill the hundreds of bulbs just beneath the surface…they will return next year. But I wonder about the blooms that had already emerged, those brave early risers who trusted the false spring. Will they survive?

I hear daffodils are hearty blooms, able to withstand cold temperatures and snow. But here’s what strikes me this morning…ice can’t kill a daffodil.

The daffodil’s real work isn’t happening in that bright yellow moment when we all stop to admire it. That bloom, as joyful and defiant as it is, lasts only weeks. The daffodil spends the rest of its time underground, in the dark, storing energy. Building reserves. The bulb quietly photosynthesizing through its leaves, sending sugars down into hidden chambers. All that light and work, tucked away where no one sees it, so that when conditions shift, when there’s finally space to emerge again, it has what it needs.

Wouldn’t that be something? The tree, that sentinel being of strength and yielding flexibility, taken down by ice, while the daffodil, who knows how to work in the dark and only surfaces to share her brightness when the time is right, becomes the Wild’s lesson in endurance?

There is something here about resilience, though I’m not sure I fully understand it yet. About what bends and what breaks. About the difference between flexibility and collapse, between yielding and surrender. About forces that seem small when measured…a few degrees, a thin glaze…but prove devastating when applied with enough persistence, enough cold weight.

The ice holds everything in suspension, beautiful and terrible at once. And underneath, in the dark soil, something small and yellow waits. Something that has been working all along, storing what it needs, trusting the ground itself to hold what matters most. The bloom will come again. Not because it’s particularly strong in the way we think of strength, but because it knows how to do the work no one sees. Because it knows the showing up is only one small part of the cycle. Because it understands that visibility isn’t the same as vitality.

Ice can’t kill a daffodil.

The ice will melt.

The trees will be cleared.

And the daffodils will push through again, fed by all that time spent in the dark.

I will keep writing, pulling threads, untangling what this season has frozen in place.

xx,
Victoria