Water. It sustains life. Literally, we cannot live without it. It’s precious.

But it can also be a real pain in the backside, especially in the winter. In the past several weeks, during a period of very cold temperatures, water has caused me some big headaches.

One day in December I heard water dripping in my furnace closet (which is in the main hallway of the house). I opened the door to find a puddle below the condensate pump, which had backed up because its drain pipe had frozen solid.

A few weeks later, I woke up one morning to find that I had no water in the house. My pipes had frozen.

Then just the other day, when we had a couple days of warm weather that melted all the snow on my roof, I found water all over the kitchen counter. This is the exact location of a roof leak that I’ve had repaired twice already.

So whether the water is where it shouldn’t be, or it isn’t where it should be, it’s a problem. But most of the time, when this life-giving element is where we want or need  or expect it to be, we take it for granted, don’t we?

Since water has been so much on my mind lately, I went out the other day hoping to find some interesting ice formations on the river in my neighborhood metropark.

Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: What is soft is strong. — Lao-Tzu

A few years ago I found some more interesting formations. Sometimes I can’t figure out how the ice ends up in certain shapes.

And then there were these bi-level ice shelves attached to tree trunks. I’m assuming these formed when the water levels changed.

Even though water can be beautiful in the winter, I’ll sure be glad when all the ice and snow are gone in a few months and the water flows freely again.