There are so many terms for the features of ice. There are no words yet for the feelings evoked by the sense of the loss of it. Ice apron. Ice blade. Iceblink cliff. Ice blister. Ice cauldron. Ice flower. Ice gang. Ice gland. Ice gruel. Ice rumples. Ice vein. Ice rise. Ice potential.

My beloved grandmother waited until I got back from Greenland before she left us. Just before she died, my mum saw a barn owl gliding across the garden, a ghost with a heart-shaped face. My mother has made that garden abundant with life. Behind it is a field and beyond that the edge of the woods.

In Greenland, I saw more icebergs than people. Every day the sky was different and the light clean and unbearable. One morning, everything was covered with fresh snow. Other days, everything underfoot was glassy. I went to help core a frozen lake with the glaciologists. Using the drill felt like putting a huge corkscrew into the ice, hoping the angle was right. You have to drill down until you reach water. There are a lot of false starts, places where the metal meets resistance. These are lenses. Eventually, the cold water gushes up to meet you. I learned how to lower down a water bottle and collect a sample, the bubbles rising quickly when the bottle was full.

Snowblink. Snowcreep. Snowglide. Snowgrain. Snowniche. Snowquake.Snow sheen. Snow swamp. Snow tremor.

The last time I lifted my grandma, I was shocked by the lightness of her bones.

In ‘The White World’ (1902), Dr Frederick A. Cook says ‘the men who aim to reach the pole are kicked about by giant seas, are pounded by heavy storms, are brushed by freezing drifts of snow, and yet they calmly resign themselves to the footfalls of a hard fate because of a few pleasures… the work is like women’s work; it is never done.’

My mother’s work is never done. While I was away, she was preparing the house so that my grandmother could be comfortable and looking after my stroke-survivor dad. Pulled back and forth between the two of them, elastic ready to snap. Before my mother’s work was never done, my grandmother’s work was never done. She understood the work of survival better than any of us. By the time she was 18, she’d already found the dead body of her father at home. By the time she was 21, she’d spent years in the TB sanatorium, had one of the first thorocoplasty operations to keep her alive.

“Hard work,” she said to me when she was dying.

It will always be too soon to write about this, too raw. Some days in Qeqertasuaq, it seemed as if the sky had been unpeeled and I felt like that too, as if there were parts of me seeing the sun and snow that should be protected, submerged.

Too much beauty exhausts us. In a small building near the town supermarket, Kirsten Schmidt-Peterson has her art shop. She paints corners of the landscape because to paint the whole would be to flatten it. Arctic foxes. A pack of dogs. Icefishing. Ice cubes on the beach. My favourite piece of her’s is called The Nature Near The Red River and it is a ‘close up photo of a scratched container’. It looks like horizon, like something flowing past very quickly.

I tried to describe a whale fluking to my grandma in her last days, but I made it sound ordinary. I watched it through a telescope and when it rose and turned my breath rose and turned with it.

Ice gang. Ice foot. Ice lens. Ice limit. Towards the end, my grandmother was always cold.

My six year old son said ‘sometimes people are sad without crying.’ On the edge of the land and at the lip of my grandmother’s bed, I felt as if my tears were suspended, frozen. In Greenland, I wanted to cry for beauty. I also wanted to cry for shame. Perhaps it wasn’t so different by her side. Beauty and shame, a two-sided coin.

There is ugliness too in the records of British and American explorers. In ‘Secrets of Polar Travel’ (1917), Peary has a chapter on ‘Eskimos and Dogs’. He seems less ambivalent about the dogs. In ‘An Arctic Honeymoon’, Florence Leonard Lee describes a camp outside Qeqertarsuaq: “the Eskimo felt the cold that night, their old skin topic was so thin, but we were in a new canvas tent with an oil stove burning. How those people did admire that oil stove, it was so ‘assuil’ (quick) - almost as much as the women admired a large pink satin muffler that I wore. I imagine I could have bought the island with it had I consented to trade.”

Mute Bourup Egede, Prime Minister of Greenland said in 2025: "We are not Americans, we are not Danes because we are Greenlanders…we cannot be bought and we cannot be ignored."

I have been reading ‘The Age of Olive Trees’ by Haia Mohamed, a poet and student from Khan Younis, Gaza. In ‘How Do You Find The Way to My Homeland?’ Haia writes: ‘when I return to the tent at night I pass a lady cooking on a clay oven / the irresistible food fills the air / I say to her what a wonderful smell / she replies please come my daughter / she doesn’t know me / I don’t know her / I know that this food isn’t even enough for her family / …. when there’s only one loaf of bread left for two days no one touches it / despite everyone starving.’

My grandmother told me she didn’t want my son to be afraid of death or to think that she was afraid of it. She said it was a phase to pass through.

Sometimes at night in his cot, my son calls me back. He believes in reincarnation, but he worries. “Mummy,” he says “what if I come back as an owl and you come back as a mouse and I have to hunt you?”. I tell him I don’t think the world would do that to a mummy and her baby, though I know this is not true.

The icebergs are something to believe in.