It started in November. Now it’s early February and I can hardly remember what was ever different.

It seems like I’ve been scraping frost off my car windshield for most of my life. Throwing bricks of snow onto a 6-foot bank. Trudging across powder near the woods. Sloshing through gray soup to the garage. Tossing salt on the transparent rock frozen to the back step.

I’m leaning on my snow shovel again, wondering what it’s all about. The cozy hope for a white Christmas has long since vanished, and in the whiteness, all that’s left is the faint recollection that in some long-lost mythical age, trees had leaves, things grew from the ground, and it used to be warm.

Here we are in deep in the ice and snow again.

It might not be so wearying if it just had some color, but it doesn’t. Or rather, it has all the colors. Snowflakes are little, clear prisms. Light passes right through them and gets refracted, or broken apart, into all the colors which, when recombined by your eye, make white.

The blankness makes it hard to believe no two snowflakes are exactly alike, but apparently it’s true. According to McKay Jenkins, author of “The White Death,” in 1884 a farmer in Vermont set out to compare individual snowflakes and started taking photographs. By 1931 he had 2,453 pictures of individual flakes – all different.

He had barely scratched the surface, though. One cubic foot of snow can contain 10 million flakes. If all the snow that’s ever fallen were accumulated at one time, it would be 50 miles deep over the entire Earth.

Given the number of snowflakes in a mess like that, it seems hasty to assume that no two were exactly alike. But despite the comparatively tiny number of samples examined, the International Commission on Snow and Ice in 1951 concluded that each snow crystal forms uniquely, in one of seven general patterns: plates, stellars, needles, columns, capped columns, spatial dendrites, and irregulars, along with three other kinds of frozen precipitation: graupel, ice pellets and hail.

Snow crystals form when water vapor condenses around grains of dust or pollen or even bacteria directly into ice, and while a lot has been observed about the crystals – which are called “lattices” – the whole process is not well understood. Some ice experts freely admit, for example, that they don’t understand how or why temperature affects the way snow crystals grow.

This is not much comfort to us who have to shovel it six months a year. Better than any scientific doubt, we can call it names.

In English we are fortunate to have a lot of them, and contrary to popular belief, Eskimos do not hold the record for snow names. The legend of the multitudinous Inuit snow words began from a casual discussion of Inuit language by Franz Boas in the early 1900s, and became embellished by speculation and popular repetition. It holds, basically, that because of their deep familiarity with cold weather, Inuit people have 23, or 42, or 50, or 100 words for different kinds of snow.

But it’s not true, really. The Inuit language, which linguists categorize as “agglutinative,” creates variable meanings by affixing endings to root words. Endings can accumulate on any root to make great, long, single words, which in English would be entire sentences. In fact, the Inuit refer to snow, ice, slush and so on using “roughly the same number of roots as in English,” linguist Geoffrey Pullum says on the academic blog, Language Log.

The variety of possibilities for talking about ice and snow in English is not to be glossed over.

In Maine we’re intimately familiar with more than just snow, ice, slush, hail, icicle, blizzard and avalanche. There’s sleet (defined by the National Weather Service as ice pellets of frozen or mostly frozen or refrozen or partially melted raindrops), freezing rain (falling as liquid and then freezing on impact), powder, dusting, hardpack, and snow mixed with rain (more than one word, but a distinct health hazard anyway). Luckily we do not have to worry about firn, which is glacial snow that has survived at least one season.

There are kinds of snow you sometimes see but don’t name, probably because they’re not dangerous. Snow that’s partly melted and refrozen and acts like ball-bearings is called corn snow. Little balls of snow about the size of BBs that you sometimes see bouncing around the ground are called graupel. Graupel is different from snow pellets, which are smaller, but larger than snow grains.

Scientifically speaking there are 14 kinds of ice: Ice I through Ice XIV. (These classifications were made famous in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s novel “Cat’s Cradle,” in which Ice IX threatens to freeze the world solid – a concept which has not seemed remarkable to Maine readers I’ve known.) But we only see one of the 14 “phases” because temperature and pressure conditions don’t allow the other ice structures to form naturally on this Earth. Instead, we have names for different forms of Ice I.

For example, rime is a kind of frost that appears when water droplets freeze on contact with an object such as a blade of grass. Its cousin, hoarfrost, grows outward directly from vapor to solid. A very thin coating of ice is called verglas; black ice on the road is a kind of verglas. An ice lens is a lens-shaped buildup in soil causing frost heaves. Pingo ice is a huge ice lens that grows underneath a pond causing a hill of ice to rise. Plate ice forms on still water. Pack ice is long-lasting ice cover over ocean water, and an ice floe is a chunk of pack ice moving with a current. An iceberg is a renegade piece of a glacier.

Sometimes, especially in March when the cold can’t make up its mind whether to further overstay its welcome or retreat, you see patches of ground with little frozen points sticking up; this is called pipkrake, or needle ice. Decayed sheet ice with protrusions that look like candles is called candled ice. Fine, pointy shapes and thin, flat, circular plates of ice suspended in water are called frazil.

I’m sure there are more words for other states of gelidity. I don’t know what you call the patch of frozen snow beside my car that threw me flat on my back last week. I just called it “ice,” along with several other unscientific names.

In Maine we do not have permafrost, though some gardeners may dispute this during what we euphemistically call “spring.” If I remember right, April is not the cruelest month in Maine; March is. Then – so the rumor goes – the ice begins to lose its grip, and daytime becomes slop time. Sometime after the last snowfall in April, night frosts may relent. Green grass and dandelions appear, and during a few days in mid-May, spring blows through. (What happens between mid-May and about June 1 is not known. Swarms of small, carnivorous flying insects have prevented anyone from going outdoors long enough for reliable weather observations to be made during this period.)

But this is crazy talk. It’s only February. Looking from my front steps to the garage where a white embankment needs to be leveled, I’m still suffering from seasonal snow-shoveling disorder, and prone to delusion.

I can’t help it. Eventually, for a brief, fleeting moment, it will be summer. Time to start stacking firewood for what’s right around the corner.

Dana Wilde can be reached at dwilde@bangordailynews.net.