Earlier today, I went down the road to my neighbor’s to pick up some kindling wood she no longer needed. Her lovely house sits right on the shore of Swan Pond, and after gathering the wood, I stuck my near-frozen fingers into my pockets and walked to the pond’s edge. While there’s a good coating of ice across its entire expanse, it’s nowhere near ready enough to be walked on, but it provides a vastly different aspect of the pond’s personality to the casual viewer.

What struck me, though, wasn’t the ice’s glass-like quality that created a mirror image of the trees and other buildings along the pond’s borders, it was the sound the water was making beneath the ice. Deep guttural, gurgling, galunking noises reached my ears from different spots across it. It occurred to me that, beneath its frozen surface, the water is still moving, and this was probably the source of the sound as it slapped the bottom of the ice, displacing air in the process. Every few yards or so, some sort of object was trapped in the ice ”“ an empty plastic water jug here, a branch there ”“ frozen in time until warmer winds prevail and set them afloat again. If these temperatures hold, that won’t happen for several weeks or until the first thaw.

In past years, the ice has been thick enough by mid-January to hold pedestrians, ice fishing shacks and even motorized vehicles. Not so this year. The temperatures are only now falling low enough and in a few days, it should be safe enough for anyone who ventures out across the pond’s frozen surface.

Mild weather notwithstanding, looking across the pond’s partially frozen expanse was mesmerizing. During other seasons, its surface would be choppy or calm depending upon how strong the wind is blowing. And during a summer storm, it comes alive with millions of rain drops. Now it is flat and rigidly still but for a few frozen ripples here and there, and it’s hard to imagine a time when it ever moved at all. The seasons have that effect. The advent of each makes the events of the preceding ones seem as though they happened a long time ago when actually it’s usually a question of just a few days, weeks or months depending upon the weather’s fickleness. Yet the differences in their characteristics are so stark as to suggest that years have gone by since those leaves on that oak were green or that the pond’s water bubbled up across the narrow shoreline on a hot summer day.

Yet, the seasons are indeed fleeting, and before long, a new one is hinting at its gradual approach. Here we are, well into January, which means that, chronologically speaking, we are less than three months away already from the onset of spring. In the woods, the morning sun shines first in the tops of the trees, great swaths of lemony light bathing the uppermost branches and streaking hillsides and knolls. As it rises above the trees, their shadows shorten until they disappear altogether before taking shape again toward the northwest. Since Dec. 21, the winter solstice, the days have been almost imperceptibly lengthening, the sun setting a wee bit later each day. Before I know it, the ice on Swan Pond will once more give way, snapping and groaning as it goes out, exposing more and more patches of bare water.

But for now, it’s enough that it reflects the images of those things that dwell along its shoreline, and safeguards the life that simmers just beneath it. It is the pond in winter, showing a different side of itself that only the cold north winds can bring out.

— Rachel Lovejoy, a freelance writer living in Lyman, who enjoys exploring the woods of southern Maine, can be reached via email at rlovejoy84253@roadrunner.com.