Relics of snow in white archipelagos

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jan/29/wenlock-edge-relics-of-snow

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Approach it cautiously, this delicate white fragment in the moss, as if looking at it too closely will, with our laser vision, melt this last flake of snow. If the arrival of snow was a becoming then the thaw is unbecoming: ill-fitting, unsuitable, messy. Days and days of snow do not take long to shift; a slight rise in temperature, a little rain and hey presto – crap.

"Looks a bit claggy," she said, even in wellies, tentatively edging around muddy sloughs in the path, which resembles a half-flooded dog's toilet. Under opaque rinds of ice a space forms, new and previously nonexistent, between the trodden ice and the trickle of water over warmed ground. A footstep collapses the ice into this thin new cave with crack and scrunch. There's a squalor about the thaw that is not present after heavy rain. That pristine arctic serenity which travelled with the snow is the first casualty. Then the brilliant fabric of its dimension corrupts until there's slush and sludge.

Looking from high places with magpie-opia for the bright shiny things, relics of snow remain in white archipelagos. Waist-deep drifts against hedges and along old tracks become lines Tipp-Exed out across fields as if concealing some mistake. Is there enough snow to roll and, with coal and carrot, fashion the human?

A patch of ground formed of quarry spoil bulldozed out before the quarry was abandoned 10 years ago has a heraldry of snow fragments on a vivid green baize of moss, like tiny swans grazing in fields. There are puddles with little bergs bearing glittery bubbles of air from a time before the freeze: an archive lost, now breathing out. In surrounding trees and hedges, birds begin to dare again, too cautious to believe they're free from snow, their songs still frozen inside them.