It’s been two hours since I took the above photograph. As I write, the bird feeder hangs a foot lower, its branch weighed down more by the ice that’s been accumulating since 8 o’clock this morning than by the squirrel helping himself to its sunflower seeds. The tree is lucky. A young oak hardly taller than our house, it’s protected from the wind by the taller trees around it. Others have not been so fortunate: a hundred feet past the backyard one is split in half; when I stepped out earlier, I saw that up and down our street branches are down. The power went off a few hours ago. It’s on again now, but I do worry—given the ice, the high winds, and the 7–9 inches of snow that’s coming—it might go off again.

Every few minutes the wind breaks ice from some nearby tree and blows it onto the roof. The ice slides off, sounding like a rock in a gutter, and shatters against the ground.

The storm is supposed to linger until tomorrow evening.

(There’s another photo at flickr. I’ll probably add more here later.)

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