ice plates

Twice now, sleet and freezing rain has encrusted everything with a half-inch layer of ice including our cars. At 4:30, the parking lots at the university are filled with the crunching sounds of ice-scrapers as people try their best to be the first one who gets to go home. Cracking through the ice takes more than the usual technique for removing frost -- you have to try to break up the ice shell into pieces before you can start chipping away at it, either by hitting in with the corner of the scraper, or, if it's on the body of the car, leaning your weight onto it until it bursts with a million cracks.

If it's warm, the ice pieces will slide along the surface of your car, held in place by the surface tension of the thin layer of water below it. You can push them around your car's window with your hands -- crashing them into each other as if it were an elementary school project about tectonic plates.

If it's cold or if the ice is really thick, you can pick giant shards of ice off the car. We tried to see who could get the biggest piece of ice off of D.'s car. M won when a piece the size of the entire trunk came off in his hands.

When you push the sheets of ice off the car they crash against the pavement with the satisfying sounds of shattering crystal. One of the only times in your life you get to throw 'plates' on the ground just to hear them explode. And when you walk across the grass, your foot crashes through the layer of ice with a satisfying, loud, 'Pop!' that echoes through the landscape.