A skin of snow on ice

Any lingering warmth departed last night, and as the mercury dropped, there was persistent but light snow in the air, the signature of the "Alberta Clipper" that rode the hounds of the Arctic to our area. By daybreak, the temperature had fallen to 9 degrees F. and that, I'd have to say, signified the first truly cold day of the winter. (To my way of evaluating low temperatures, anything in double digits below, say, 50, is merely chilly; for real cold, you have to bear witness to temps in the single digits and south. (We rarely see readings in the double-digits-below-zero around here, and you certainly don't need a naturalist to tell you what category those negative numbers fall into.) So it was officially cold when the sun came up, and wonderfully sparkling. There certainly wasn't enough snow to ski on, but I thought that it might have been enough to be a canvas on which passing animals could record their stories. No such luck, but in one spot by a frozen tiny stream, there was a curious opening. The ice underneath was solid, so I have no idea why this curious pattern developed. Some things are just mysteries, which is fine by me.