We’re in Middlebury, Vermont, with my parents for this week, exploring a town that’s new to all of us. There are no memories that go back generations. Instead, we get to learn together.

Today we went for a drive out to the local ski area and back to the house we’re renting for the week. The road, winding up a mountain steep enough that trucks are advised to stay away, skirts a brook that borders on river size in spots. Along the way are numerous signs for the Green Mountain National Forest.

We pulled into one park that claimed it was the “Green Mountain Robert Frost Trail” and followed the newly-constructed wood bridge system over marshland (I’d imagine birders would be in heaven) and eventually across that brook/river.

As might be expected in late December in mid-Vermont, where temperatures last week climbed into the balmy single digits for 4 days running, ice covered part of the waterway.

But not all.

Under the ice, water rushed along, bumping along the underside of the frozen sheet.

It occurred to me that not only have I never seen this phenomenon before, I’d never really thought about it as a possibility. Somehow I thought that the water was one day clear and then the next it was frozen, poof. Not so, or at least not here in this particular stream.

Like getting ready to go cruising, or change your life in any way, there are trappings and exterior changes while under it all the rest just plain continues, visible if you look hard enough. And then one day, you won’t be able to see the old.

Until spring, when it thaws and reappears.

Happy holidays to you and yours, however you celebrate and wherever you are.