Let's take a few minutes to focus on a backyard phenomenon that doesn't often make headlines: "meteorological deposition" - big words to describe frost. Our beloved Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley celebrated frost in one of his most endearing and enduring poems.

When a surface (like grasses, leaves, trees, and plants) is chilled below the air's dew point, frost forms on the freezing surface. Ice crystals can blanket the surface, edge it, or come up through cracks.

Hoar frost or radiation frost forms on clear, cold nights when heat escapes into the sky, allowing trees, shrubs, and such to become colder than the air. The icy crystals that coat branches like frosting seem to turn the entire landscape into a magical, white fairyland. Only the rising sun can melt this picturesque coating, returning the outdoors to its usual, everyday appearance.

Frost takes other forms as well. Wind frost (also known as "advection frost") takes the form of tiny ice spikes that rim nature's objects when there is a very cold wind blowing. This crystalline edging usually appears on the side opposite the wind's direction. Frost flowers are a rare wonder to behold, occurring when air temperatures are freezing but the ground is yet to freeze. They can look just like another flower atop an already dead flower. Fern frost decorates windows when water vapors collect on a glass pane exposed to really cold air on the outside and moist air indoors.

In Indiana, we know the difference between light and hard frost. The former teases us into autumn while a hard frost in which freezing temperatures are sustained over a period of hours seems to hit us like a hammer, ending the growing season. We rarely welcome Jack Frost painting icy crystals on plants, windows, and cars. Riley, however, glorified frost as he wrote:

The arrival of frost spurs us into battening down the yard, setting our birdfeeders, putting on storm windows, and storing patio furniture to prepare for the winter season. Yes, it signals us to draw on memories of past summers in our backyards to keep us warm.