Photo of the Day: After the Big Freeze

I suspect that more than a few relatives and friends in different areas of the country are saying right now, “You think your weather is bad? Wait’ll you hear about mine!”

Still, what we had in the New York area on Friday and Saturday was one of those stretches that meteorologists come up with fancy new names for. It started on Friday with the plunging temperatures accompanied by winds that could have come out of that twister from The Wizard of Oz. By Saturday morning, the temperatures had plunged into the single digits.

I didn’t go outside until Saturday afternoon, when I heard the thermometer was going to exceed 10 degrees outside—a veritable heat wave, in my book.

Thankfully, this time, the cold spell was comparatively brief. By late this afternoon, a bunch of stir-crazy people had, like me, gone over to Overpeck County Park, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ, to get some exercise for themselves or their dogs. (It was an open question which needed it more.)

I could see some evidence of the thaw not just in the number of people venturing outside, but on the extent of the ice in the adjacent Overpeck Creek. Had I been crazy enough to go by yesterday (braving frostbite, I might add), that stream would have been frozen solid.

But when I took this photo this afternoon, I took some comfort—as I hope you will now—in cracks in the ice that were forming. The best sign of hope for me would be a raft of ducks blissfully together, unvexed by ice as they swim in the stream once again.