An Icicle is not a Popsicle©, or is it?

Close your eyes for a moment and think about the last time you broke off an icicle and sucked on it as a popscile. Think about how it stuck to your mittens and you saw your breath while you brought it to a very sharp point. Yum.

I was always disappointed that our house didn't have icicles. It wasn't fair that some of the kids in the neighborhood had many to harvest through out the winter. They also had the priviledge of knocking several down at a time and watching them fall and be buried in the snow. If they did it fast enough, a klink-klink sound happened as they hit each other before dropping into the drift. It seemed as if most of the good icicles were on the south side of the houses. I wondered about that, too.

My favorite one was at St. Paul Grocery. On Wednesday mornings, we went to the church chosen by our parents to attend Wednesday School. It didn't matter how far it was, you walked. I went to Knox School and attended church school at Zion Lutheran. It was about a mile jaunt. That is how I met the big icicle on the grocery store.

Every week, it seemed to get bigger and wider, and dirtier. I wondered if one could break it off in a big piece and look at it in the winter sun.

Since I didn't seem to get an answer that I understood from parent's or grandparents. I started looking at our house and other houses and trying to figure out what the difference was. What I noticed was our house had snow on the roof and others had patches of shingle showing.

It occurred to me that my parents and grandparents knew the answer, I just had not asked the right question. I asked my contractor father why those houses had shingle showing and ours didn't. He told me that those houses weren't insulated and the heat was going up causing the snow melt. Well, if that were the case, then if the snow was melting, water was running slowly, forming the icicles. It wasn't that complicated at all! I guess I would just have to go to Hanson's and get my icicle fix, or any other house in the neighborhood that had the shingles showing.

So in our freeze/thaw society, I still look at roofs for heat loss and check the south sides for icicles! One year, an icicle formed on the high line wire! It hung there until the spring winds came!

Obviously the picture of the logging shack shows there is a lot of heat loss through the roof. I wonder if anyone ever sucked on them?!

Clink, clank!

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