icy fetters

Our friend Chip Greenberg discribed this very aptly:

The countryside was gorgeous all weekend after a night of freezing rain and then a cold morning. All the branches and twigs of the trees, and every stalk of grass, was encapsulated by a tube of ice. In the mornings, the low sun glimmered and sparkled off everything. As the sun rose and the ice began to melt off the trees, tinkling breakage was everywhere and the ground littered with half-tubes of “glass” of many diameters. The gound crunched wherever you walked adding sound to the beauty.

His hoary frost, his fleecy snow, Descend and clothe the ground,

The liquid streams forbear to flow, In icy fetters bound.

("Winter", from the Sacred Harp)

Our weekend in the Berskshires was a wonderland.