About 7:30 this morning, I opened the thick, insulating window quilts and discovered a world outside my window filled with sweetness. Overnight, someone had dusted the dark gray roof of the garage with confectioner’s sugar.

The red-green leaves of the raspberry plants had been sprinkled with an icing of frost. And between the branches of the hibiscus shrub, thin strands of spider web were now coated with translucent sparkles. When the sun rose above the rim of eastern trees, it sent shimmers of rainbows to light up the scene.

Along with the sweetness, there was loveliness. Mix sunlight and water together, water in any form, and you have beauty: rays of the sunlight sparkling on a swift flowing stream, the blinding beams of our star reflecting off newly fallen snow, or on this November morning, a touch of sun on the frozen dew.

I know as the sunlight warms the air, the frost will melt, evaporate, and be gone. On the north side of the house, the grass in the building’s shadow will remain tinged with white for a few hours, but as the shadow shifts, the areas newly open to the sun will slowly lose their pale coloration and revert to green again. The frost melts and with it, the magic.

A good meteorological Web site can give us the factors that cause frost to form. Think of that interesting stone sculpture you have in your garden. As its surface cools overnight, it can become colder than the dewpoint of the air around it. (Dewpoint is the temperature at which the water vapor in the air will begin to return to a solid or liquid state.) If the surface temperature continues to drop below freezing, then vapor in the surrounding air condenses and forms frost on the colder surface. So: cold air, colder surface, moisture in the air, and you have the ingredients for frost.

Have you ever noticed the windshield of your car often is covered with frost but the nearby grass isn’t? Glass, metal and rocks lose their heat more quickly than vegetation does. So, your car’s windows will condense that moisture in the air first. This is also the reason some areas of the ground will frost up sooner than others. Sand, for instance, retains less heat than other types of soil, so frost will form first in sandy areas and only later in clay soils.

Long after the frost melted away today, I opened the big freezer in the basement to take out some blueberries for tomorrow’s breakfast. I noticed a layer of frost on the walls of the freezer and wondered why it had formed there. A little research gave me the answer.

The temperature in the freezer is kept at zero degrees, but the food I put into it is considerably warmer. The heat given off by the food combines with the cold air in the freezer to cause moisture to circulate. When that moisture touches the cold walls, it condenses and forms frost. Unfortunately, in my freezer, no morning sun comes along to melt that frost.

Some day when I’ve removed and eaten all the summer produce-the blueberries picked and cleaned, the beans cut and bagged, the tomatoes pureed and sauced-I’ll decide the few packages left will fit into a couple coolers and I’ll go to work to remove the frost. Until then, the frost will stay.

Meanwhile, on these cold fall mornings we wake to find that, overnight, nature has scattered emeralds on the grass and diamonds on the roof. The child in me dreams of winged fairies dancing madly in the cold night air, shedding sequins off their dresses to adorn the dangling brown leaves still clinging to the oaks. Everywhere the little creatures’ tiny feet touch, a drop of frost forms. They play hide and seek among the leaves of the raspberry canes and from their giggling breaths the frost emerges. My yard is their playground and the night is their time to come out of hiding to romp through the garden.

We need science to help us to understand the world around us, to explain how things work and why things are the way they are. Without science, we couldn’t create electricity, travel long distances, or understand the past.

Yet sometimes scientific explanations leave us cold. Surely my fanciful interpretation of why we have frost on cold fall mornings is much more satisfying than dewpoints and condensation. Don’t you agree?

By Susan M. Poirier, Master Gardener