"Water remembers," my grandma used to say. "It is patient. Not like trees. Trees have time but water—water has eternity."
And she was right. You can see its stories etched into the face of the Earth if you know where to look. Its tales meander through valleys; glaciers leaving boulders like exclamation marks in the landscape. Memories, crystalized and locked in ice that, if you know how to listen, tell a story over the years.
"Ice forgives," my grandma used to say. I was a child back then and we were walking along the river; her on the path that had been cleared of the snow, me knee-deep in it. As she spoke, she stopped and broke off an icicle that had grown on a branch. She snapped it in two and handed both halves to me. Proud that I already knew this trick, I took them and breathed on the broken ends. When I spotted the tell-tale gleam of water on the ice, I stuck the ends back together, held them in place, and waited patiently until the biting winter cold had glued the halves back together.
When my grandma passed away, the snow was melting and the ice in the river thawing; long before the first day of spring. It was a warm winter. In fact, the warmest yet to be recorded. Just like the previous winter. And the one before that. After the funeral, we made our way through the slush and sleet to her house—red timber walls and white window frames. The garden that would produce an abundance of berries and flowers come summer resembled a sea of mud more than anything. But inside the smell of fresh coffee and my grandma's perfume still clung to the wooden floorboards, the leaf-patterned curtains, and old but sturdy furniture—even if only in my imagination.
"Ava, look at this," Emil's voice rang from the living room. When I entered, he was sitting on the floor with an open shoebox beside him, and photos scattered all around.
"I've never seen those before. Those must be Grandpa's."
Emil was the oldest grandchild and the only one who could remember Grandpa. And so, while our grandma had barely spoken of him after his death, Emil would tell me stories of how he went ice fishing with grandpa, or how he had built a tree house for him one summer.
I kneeled next to Emil on the rag rug and took a pile of photos from the box. The colors were pale and faded either due to the initial exposure or by time. The first photo showed Grandpa in his late thirties or early forties next to an ice sculpture of a beaver that reached up to his waist.
I held the image closer to my phase to make out the details of the beaver's face. "Did he make this?"
Emil nodded. "Yeah, I think if carving things out of ice would have paid the bills, he would've done only that."
"I guess he wouldn't be very happy with the winters these days." I put the photo of Grandpa and the beaver aside and took a look at the next one. Grandma was pulling a sled packed with blocks of ice in the picture. Her face was red from the cold and the spruce trees in the background bowed under their heavy load of snow. I flipped the photo and glanced at the neat handwriting on its back which read February 1991, Selma helping Elias with ice from the river.
"No, I guess he wouldn't be." Emil shrugged. "Mind you, I vividly remember him complaining about the winters getting warmer and shorter leaving him with less time for his ice sculptures. And that was what? Twenty-ish years ago?"
Outside, the sun had disappeared and the room was only lit by the soft glow of the ceiling light. From the kitchen came the sounds of Mom and Aunt Linda chatting while making coffee. I got up and walked over to the window to try and chase out the numbness that had crept into my legs. My own eyes looked back at me from the dark window pane but behind the reflection of my face, I could make out the outlines of the garden just enough to guess at where the small path was that led through a copse to the river.
"Ice is a great place to think," my grandma used to say. I was seven the first time I heard her speak those words. I sat next to her on a blanket she had placed on the first snow of the winter.
"Just listen," she told me, and I listened while I cradled a mug of hot chocolate in my hands, barely able to move them in my mittens. The sky hung above us, pale and quiet. There was a light breeze, soundless and unable to stir the frozen branches. We were close enough to the river to see it, but no sound came from there either. It lay still and quiet like the sky and the trees, sleeping under its frozen surface. I listened and wondered at her words. It was only years later that I realized that the stillness of ice allowed me to hear my own thoughts better.
The second time, my grandma spoke those words was in early spring a few years later. We walked from the river towards the fjäll pausing only to watch the floes of ice that drifted downstream.
"Ice is a great place to think," my grandma told me. "It asks you to take your time and look closely, to pay attention to the details. They’re predicting a cold spell later this week. The river might freeze again. If you don't pay attention, you might think that it never melted in the first place. But ice changes every day, much like people, and if you know what to look at you can see the history of an entire winter recorded in it."
At the far end of the garden, between a group of birch trees, something moved and I snapped out of my memories. I squinted my eyes in an attempt to block out the reflection in the glass. In the darkness, I could make out a vague shape. It was as tall as a large moose but more slender. Unmoving it stood there, but as soon as I blinked it vanished. It was just the garden, now, and the copse behind it where the branches of the birches swayed in the wind and the spruces stood tall and still.
"Coffee's ready," my mom called from the kitchen. And just when I was about to turn away from the window, a fleck of white floated through my vision: A single snowflake tumbled through the dark afternoon sky, soon followed by another and a third. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I heard my grandma's voice.
"Ice remembers," she used to say. "Ice forgives."
This story is inspired by an interview with Tim Linhart—who sculpts ice into musical instruments—conducted by participants of the Climate Walk project.
Written by Merle Emrich.
Cover illustration by Amr Abbas.