Lady Frost

It snowed on Sunday.

It was the most beautiful moment. The flakes floated down softly, yet vastly, and blanketed the world in white silence. It continued this way, muffling the earth and quieting the anxiety.

It settled in mounds, neatly covering surfaces, polite enough not to transgress corners too sharply.

Then the night set in. The skies were clear and bright, deceivingly normal. They told no secrets, and never whispered of the harsh frost that slid down over the snow, beads of icy diamond, crystal hand running smoothly over the world, leaving trails of black ice and hardening the surface of the globe.

Harsh.

Bitter.

Painful.

Treacherous.

Tendrils of bitter cold snaking through the streets, splaying over the pathways, freezing around the condensation on doors, cracking in the locks and stubbornly welding things together.

The world was so beautiful come morning. White and blue, a clear sky in stages of brightening colour, black, bare boughs against soft blues and yellows of a mellow sky.

The snow didn’t melt, it stayed in the same way in which it settled, untouched, with a dangerous glint to its surface.

And pavements were deadly, and cars crackled on the road as they inched oh so slowly around corners.

Frost is the most beautiful and majestic creature, she changes the world so marvellously, but to love her is to prick one’s finger on a flowering rose bush. She is deceiving and devious. She is only good in sips, the rest of the time one spends peering at her through heavy hoods or the cloudy window from the warmth of one’s home.

 

On Pines

What I really like about winter is the fact that if you live in a pine studded estate, you do not lack for lush greenery. There is something so pleasing, so soothing, about the dark green splash against silvery white, against dull brown and grey, swaying with mighty force through torrents of winter wind. Pines are the trees of winter. They master the season, like the fiery cascade of death masters autumn.

I’m gonna really miss this ole place.

Dear November

You are cold and harsh this year, my dear. You gave us glorious snow two years ago. Snow that stopped the world, that created mounds in the roads, that fell in heavy heaps from the trees, thumping softly and unseen below. Snow that created a muffled silence, a glazed paradise.

Now, you are empty fields, frozen soil. Sheep droppings in icy piles. Wet puddles, rain. Desolate, muddy moisture.

You have lost your ardour, November. And I have nothing to do, so I am soaking in the dreary fields, with tired eyes. I feel like the days are all merging into one.

Heavy clouds scud across the sky and I see perpetual frondescence before me, endless and ending. Scene flashing in and out of focus as my feet trudge over grazed grass, chewed down to the stalk. Wherever I turn I see the world shrouded in ceaseless grey, evergreens surging up in the corner of my vision, a chasm, yet so full of being.Every breath I take is life, photosynthesis, respiration, cells laboring throughout organisms, cogs in the machine of life, breathing, working, living.

But oh, November, it feels so still to me. I don’t see your city lights, twinkling through the cold haze in the night. I don’t see warm shop windows, glittering with Christmas preparations. No fancy boots, woolly scarves snuggling into crisp, smiling faces, red noses, fluffy hats, curls tumbling over pretty, fashionable coats. Heels clicking, merry music wafting on the breeze, hot donuts sprinkled with sugar, carts of candy cane and coloured balls of fluffy sugar on the high street. No rush, hurry, drama.

It’s all emptiness here. Rolling hills, scuffled footprints of animals long gone, mist creeping over dark terrain, pitch black, death everywhere. I longed for emptiness, November, and green. I longed for trees and nature. Now I am not so sure.

Sometimes I wake up in the dark and I watch the branches of the evergreens swaying madly in the night, hear the menacing whistle of forces I cannot see hurtling over grassland, and I sit beneath the sky light wondering about the outside, in this snug cocoon of fluffy pyjamas and spotlights and heat storage radiators.

I can’t help but wonder, sometimes; where do I stand in this vast system of existence?

Hurry up, November, and send us some snow, that I might listen to the glistening stillness, and behold the world muted for a moment, holding its breath, so I can catch up at long last.