The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day

Today is the fifth day in a row that temperatures have fallen below zero.

We've had these on the upstairs windows, on the inside panes behind the storms, for almost a week.
Ice feathers

I woke up thinking about Auden's poem, "In memory of W.B. Yeats":
"He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day."

The weather makes life feel serious. Not as dour or deserted as Auden's dark cold day, but grave and austere. Daily things are critical. There's a feeling of free-fall as the mercury sinks. I get out of the car and walk R all the way to the door of school because if I didn't see her go inside and watch the door shut behind her, I would feel uneasy all day. The last two nights I've woken before dawn with a terrible dread that I forgot to bring Charlie back in after his last trip outside. I have to get up and check in his crate to see his little sleeping body before I can go back to sleep.

On the way to school today, the wind was blowing swirling drifts of snow, in big puffs across the frozen field where there is an iris farm in spring. I was trying to remember the Galway Kinnell poem about smoke and snow. I looked it up when I got home. It's from "Two Seasons":
"I spoke to you that last winter morning
Watching the wind smoke snow across the ice."

That's exactly what it looked like, someone slowly and dreamily exhaling puffs of smoke across the ice.

R likes to stand on the bed and look and look through the crystals. She says it's the Snow Fairy's palace.

When I was little I would sit on the counter in the bathroom and open the mirrored medicine cabinet until it made a tunnel with the wall mirror, a long infinitely repeating icy corridor. I would walk my finger down it and pretend I was in an ice castle.

Last week, R made a bird feeder from a crayon box and filled it with bread crumbs and seeds and hung it outside, so the birds could reach food if the ground was too snowy. I asked her if she thought that that the window crystals were a message from the Snow Fairy, to thank R for taking care of her wild animals. I didn't think she would take it seriously, but now she opens the storm window to write "thank you" in the ice on the outer window. She leaves little notes and gifts for the Snow Fairy before she goes to sleep.

I didn't see her put this on her windowsill last night, and she was upset this morning that the Snow Fairy hadn't taken her gift. "I got mixed up, I put Tooth Fairy, but it's not, it's the Snow Fairy. Is that why she didn't take it?" I asked her why she chose those things to give, and she said "They're just some toys that I still like, but I want her to have them." I talked her into keeping the toys and just leaving a note next time.