Creative Destruction

There is a city that to me will always be the sound of ice.

When you are alone, in an unknown place, every sound is magnified, every detail noted. It is possible, that on another day, with other people, I would not have noticed. But touching down alone, the wheels of my case click-click-clicking over airport concourses, and pavement slabs, and cold station tiles, I hear everything.

The snow has melted from the streets, leaving stray traces that only the everyday detective would see: darkened slush in the nook where the kerb meets the road, an untouched snow-pillow atop a scooter shroud, the cold drop of rain from a brilliantly clear blue sky.

(When I ask later, I find they have a name just for the rain that falls when the snow on high buildings melts, the rain that lives a second life)

And in an empty suburban street, the whirr of a straw-basketed bicycle fading away somewhere unseen, I begin to hear it fully. A soft whump, as a parked car sheds its load of snow in the morning sun. A syncopated tinkle of meltwater drips on a metal drain cover. The heavy whispering of whitened branches that let loose a small blizzard of snowflakes that are not snowflakes but feathery clumps of them, falling for the second time to earth.

In the deserted silence of this workday morning, the dying snow is playing me music.

And days later I discover a new note: the sound of an icicle, dashed like crystal against the wall of a wooden chalet. We snap them from the eaves, foot-long and smoothly ridged, instruments of the cold that we play tunelessly. Our breath smoking in the night air. And all night long the snow falls, covering our footprints.