Unseen Beauty: A Journal

Frost

There is white in the beard of the spirit of Florida this morning. In the grander scheme of things, Florida is a young place, a place where the hand of civilization has not yet choked the spirit of the land. Many people do not like Florida, or simply choose to ignore or stifle its native flora and fauna; the nature of Florida is different, wilder, younger, less amenable to humanity than the older, gentler spirit of the north. But there is great beauty in that wild soul, if one has the patience to stop and to look.

The cold rolled in last night, touching the Florida landscape with the unfamiliar finger of frost and ice. As the sun peered over the horizon, the first glow of light spreading pale fingers across the green and brown landscape of the Florida winter, a strange sight greeted those of us out of bed early enough to see it. The familiar brown stubs of grass, interspersed with the heartier green of “weeds” was cloaked in white. From the hoar-frosted edges of the palm fronds to the shimmering pale blanket spread across the lawns, winter had come.

Along the roadsides, cars breathed plumes of white smoke into the pale air as their occupants shivered their way into the chilled boxes of steel and plastic. Drainage areas, turned to lakes as they clung to the memory of last week’s rains, were transformed into patchwork quilts of molten silver, their surfaces mottled with scraps of ice. Deeper ponds resisted the touch of the cold, breathing steam around the ice-coated stems of the water plants reaching upward through their surface to the pale sky.

And here and there, as I whizzed by the pale fields, I could see circles of deep green, sheltered from the cold by the drooping branches of the live oaks, standing proud against the frost and the chill, waiting patiently for the promise of summer. Rolling into my parking space, I shivered my way across the grey pavement, squinting against the light of the sun making its way over the scrim of trees to the east of the college. And, in the pale morning silence, I could have sworn I heard the rolling laughter of Florida himself, brushing the ice from his beard and stretching chilled muscles as the day began and the white blanket of frost faded in the liquid fire of the southern sun’s touch.