Winter

I walked to Flakis in the dark. My nose tingled, and my ears. On the side of the road, last week's snow is by now packed into a solid mass, and on the road itself, where it hasn't been rubbed off by the passing of many wheels, it's become a slick surface that echoes the tiniest suggestion of light: the last glimmers of daylight among the clouds, farm lights in the distance, the glow of my mp3 player. At one point, in this gloom and cold, my ears where being pumped by the recorded chirps of spring birds. The contrast was jarring, and sweet.

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Before my norwegian class, i sat at one of the tables outside Flakis shop and smoked a cigarette. The wooden surface was coated in tiny, glittering crystals condensed (how?!?) from the dry air, too brittle and crisp to support smoke. Whorls and clumps of it drifted from the tip of my cig, sank and got snagged on the itsy-bitsy irregularities of the planks, then lazily broke up, and finally dissolved.

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Every morning, new frozen tracks appear on the walls of my house, on my door, on my windows. They are thin, curved, swirling lines that look as if some gravity-defying goblin had been ice-skating on these vertical planes. Combined, they form a fuzz that seems to grow from buildings, a white mildew-like blanket that speaks of age and time passing slowly, silently, smoothly creeping along. Which is, of course, the essence of winter.