Too many to count. Hundreds fallen into the road or beside the road. Some lay uprooted, their tangle of roots exposed. Some lay chopped into two, three foot diameter logs. Others lay in a tangle of branches, like strands of unwashed, unkempt hair. Others like brooms, their webs of extended branches reaching out.
And those white birches that didn't snap remain bowed, bent into an unnatural arch, like a ballerina taking a bow. They remind me of Robert Frost's poem, Birches:
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
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