KindleAfter a last tantrum of unusual warm days for the season, this long autumn, child of burnt hydrocarbons, has finally given free entry to winter. Bright white days. Twenty five below.
Even before coming into contact with the air, my breath freezes inside my nostrils, causing a constant and unpleasant feeling of dried up booger. Eventually, some loose tear congeals in the corner of my eye as a rheum or, if I blink, it welds my eyelashes and I can’t then open my lids. Under the soles of the footwear or the rubber of the tyres, the snow cries its loud creak of trampled grave. At night, the humidity sublimates on the thinnest tree branches, coating them in a perfect, uniform frost layer, like on a Christmas card. At noon, after a the weak warming up of a sunny day, that same frost thaws and falls from the branches in a myriad microscopic ice crystals sprinkled from above, in a soft snowfall of sparkling diamond dust. The flowing water in the canal or by the wharf, that never freezes, constantly smokes a ghostly mist of boiling cauldron that vanishes into thin air only a few feet above the surface, evoking a fabulous landscape of enchanted swamp. And at dusk, on the horizon, the snow’s bluish white and the sky’s whitish blue blend together, so that one can’t tell the boundary.
The lake, now lethargic, has finally silenced its otherworldly moans.
