Icicles are supposed to be beautiful, sort of like living chandeliers, but I have a vague remembrance of once being told that as far as Newburyport houses go, icicles are bad, bad, bad.

I’m not sure if this is true, but it actually makes sense to me, so I’ve decided it is true.

This is one of the reasons I use my trusty roof-rake (see previous post), so, among other reasons, I don’t have the dreaded (all though I’m not sure why) Newburyport icicle thing.

I stand out in my Newburyport driveway, look at my Newburyport roof, and despite having used my trusty Newburyport roof-rake, I still have icicles. This is a mystery. But I’ve decided that although slightly menacing and dagger like, they also so sort of do look like drippy little chandeliers about to bring down my roof gutters, so I decide to enjoy them, or as my son would say, “Mom, just forget about it–put it on the shelf.”

On the shelf, the icicle thing goes, that is until I go for my walk. Then I start noticing icicles all over my neighborhood.

And on one house the icicles look as if they are blowing sideways. I’m not kidding, not up and down icicles, but sideways icicles.

I stand in the middle of the road (it’s a rarely traveled, Newburyport one way street road) and examine this ambiguity. “Could it be that this particular Newburyport house is close to the water, and the icicles actual are blowing in the wind,” I think to myself.

But as I walk back to my dwelling, I actually find crooked icicles dangling here and there. And gasp, when I get back to my own house, I notice that I actually have one angled icicle. One angled icicle among many, many long nifty straight ones.

Now this really is inscrutable.

I suppose I could visit the World Wide Web and learn about this icicle mystery one day. But for now, I’ve just decided to take my son’s wise advice, and really and truly put the icicle thing “on the shelf,” and accept this odd icicle anomaly.