Breakup
A wild wind jostled Henry, sometimes shoving him sideways into the bare branches of the honeysuckle hedge along the walk. When he got to the lake he climbed down the little bluff and found a snug spot between two old cottonwoods. The wind was roaring and rattling high up in the trees, but down here he was mostly out of it.
The sun played tag with clumps of cloud. Henry sat wedged low, first in warm light then in chilly shadow. He tucked to his knees as clouds flew over and pelted him with snow. But when the sun broke clear he could sit up and see all the way to the far shore. And always, almost as loud as the wind, was the groaning of the ice, like a tribe of giants—all with bellyaches.
For a moment the wind dropped and the groaning eased. In the quiet, Henry heard something new—he heard grinding and he heard crunching, and then a few loud booms. When he looked left and right along his side of the lake he saw that the ice had begun to move. The ice was coming ashore. It was coming right towards him.
Both up and down the shore the ice was coming in. It was peeling up sand. It was plowing under frozen sand and lifting it up. It was pushing pebbles and stones. It was shoving rocks. A wall of sand and rocks, was climbing right up the bluff.
With a crack, a fold of thick, sandy ice rose up like a mountain. Then it collapsed as another rose on top of it. Henry scrambled out of his hiding place and ran for home.
He crashed through the side door, raced up the landing, and slid into the kitchen.
His mother stood there staring at him, her mouth open, her hands full of flour.
“Mom,” Henry said, “the ice is breaking up!”
Before she could say a word in reply Henry had banged back out of the house.
When he got to the lake he avoided his sheltered hollow but instead stood in the lee of the biggest cottonwood. The ice was still rumbling and crashing and piling up onshore. It was like a hundred bulldozers all working at once, anything in its way being shifted, lifted, or crushed.
Henry just stared at the wildness. Then he felt a tap on his shoulder.
“Wow,” his mom shouted over the wind, “You weren’t April foolin’.”
The two of them leaned against the cottonwood, mostly in its lee, and watched.
It didn’t take very long before a big hole opened in the middle of the lake. Up and down the shore, in both directions, sheets, and slabs, and shards of ice piled up, all the way to the top of the bluff. The shoreline was being plowed, gouged, and seriously rearranged.
And just like that the lake itself was open water, sparkling blue, with whitecaps—when it wasn’t snowing.
“It’s all gone,” Henry said. “That didn’t take long. Yesterday the lake was solid ice, you could maybe walk across, and now it’s gone.”
Waves were splashing on the piles of ice, pulling them back into the water.
“I’m glad you didn’t walk across,” his mother said.
“Spring is really here,” Henry said.
“I think you’re right,” his mother said. “I bet you’ll be swimming by your birthday.”
As Henry and his mom walked back to the house, hurried along by the blast, the sun went behind a cloud and a shower of hard, round snow pellets rattled on their hats and coats.
“Maybe Dad will want to go fishing on Saturday,” Henry said.
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” his mom replied. “I’m actually quite sure he will.”