I remember looking forward to wintertime when I was growing up. The first day of snowfall was one of my favorite days of the year. Seeing the fresh new snow on the ground sparkling in the sun, making snow angels in the snow, and having snowball fights with my brothers were always some of my favorite activities to do. The one thing that always sparked my curiosity was the icicles, sometimes it was for the better, and for others it was for the worse.

Icicles are one of the special wonders you get in wintertime. Summer has fireflies, spring has the blooming flowers and trees, and fall has the fallen leaves. For me, icicles were the most fascinating thing about winter time. When I was little I had no idea where they even came from. All I knew is that when I went to sleep at night, there would be a fresh new set of four or five just outside my window.

Every kid has a favorite color when they are little. They like the reds, the greens, the blues, so I must have been a strange child because during wintertime my favorite “color” was translucence. My older brothers thought that was a boring color to like, especially for a five year old, but I always defended myself saying that I had the shiniest color of them all. Clear was the color of the icicles outside of my bedroom. Clear was the color I would wake up to and see glistening in the morning light through the icicles. Sometimes clear would even reflect a rainbow into my bedroom, so I thought I was the smartest kid to have clear as my favorite color because technically, clear was every color.

Picking icicles was one of my favorite things to do as well. I loved to suck on them and bite on them pretending like I was Bugs Bunny eating a carrot. One day, my curiosity got the best of me. One day we stopped at my Aunt Brenda’s house to pick up my little brother and sister. My mom left my brother Colin and I in the car because it was only going to take about two minutes. This is when my curiosity got the better of me. I saw that along the outside of my aunt’s house she had humungous icicles dangling from the roof. These were some of the biggest I had ever seen. I quickly turned to my brother and asked him if he would want an icicle to suck on for the ride home. He said yes and I got out of the car and ran to the other side of the house. I found the biggest two icicles on the house for me and my brother. So I stepped on one of those air conditioning boxes, that are always outside of people’s houses, and reached to pull down the icicle. Only a fragment broke off, and then the next thing that I know the entire icicle was falling down on top of me. I quickly covered my head like we do in tornado drills during school. However that did not protect the lower half of my head. The icicle left a gaping hole on the back of my head, and my hair was blood red. I ran into the house and my mom and aunt said the hole was pretty deep. I did not go to school the next couple of days because of it, and I got dizzy a lot.

I guess I have learned my lesson about the dangers of icicles. I still admire them but today from afar. I ask someone else to pick me off an icicle instead, always a reasonably small sized one. Curiosity can sometimes be a good thing and sometimes a bad thing, but in the end it always ends up teaching us a lesson.