I've come to talk to you again

The first morning it happened there were still leaves on the trees; colorful, mostly dry leaves, but leaves on the trees. I was taking the day turn-out horses out -- two horses plus me and a dog crunching through the gravel. Inside the gate I removed halters and the horses ambled away and I watched them, always in love with horse flesh.

And then I heard it. A sound. I didn’t know what it was. Maybe the wind in the leaves of the trees in the back fence row? No, there was no wind. Birds? There was no movement in the leaves, in the sky. I stood there and listened. And suddenly I knew what it was, as improbable as it seemed: it was

the sound
of frost
melting.

Wow. I had heard the sound of frost melting. Was there even such a thing?

And then, a few days ago, I was out getting the only two horses still turned out overnight. The welt of my boots was banked with the frost I had walked through. Their halters, hanging on hooks by the gate overnight, were white with frost. I started to speak to them and then I heard it again. It is a different sound than anything else I’ve ever heard, and this time there weren’t dry leaves to amplify it, but it must have been the frost on the fencing and the twigs on the trees and the weeds still standing from summer but dried out for the winter.

The sound of frost melting.