Becky called the other day while cutting out paper snowflakes with Andrew, reminding me of the ones I did in school which often turned out square, one more hint that I had no aptitude for art or craftsmanship (thank God for words).  But that led me to think of the last ice age some 10,000 years ago when in the reaches of what is now Hudson Bay it began to snow, flake upon flake and when summer came those flakes didn’t melt and the next winter snow fell flake upon flake and to borrow a line from the bible “good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over.”  Year upon year snowflakes fell flake by flake not melting in the summer but heaping up and pressing down on their siblings beneath turning them to ice upon layers of ice, whereupon at some point the ice began to creep south, slowly slowly piled two miles high like a gigantic cold bulldozer scraping off the earth and leveling mountains and hills, raising valleys, making “the rough places plain.” As it pushed south carrying parts of Canada into the states below so that when it melted some thousands of years later it left behind a new terrain  drumlins, eskers, kame, and chunks of ice buried, left to melt over the centuries to form pot hole lakes in the woods to be discovered by young men squirrel hunting in October.  It left boulders and rocks entombed which thawing winter frost heaved up, providing an early inert crop to be harvested in the spring by aching backed farmers and their children and thrown on heaping piles along field edges before the oats and corn ground could be worked and made ready for sowing.  Picking rocks was a kind of post Easter penance, a sign of resurrection, if you will, to be done year after year all because in the reaches of Hudson Bay 10,000 ago flake upon snowflake fell and did not melt.