The cold that binds it

“It’s cold today, isn’t it?” I comment to my son, as we trudge up the hill toward home.

“Yeah, a bit,” he replies.

It’s minus eighteen celsius and the wind is blowing. It’s cold.

Is it my imagination, or does the return of this brilliant spring light sharpen the air? The piercing light leaves us squinting into the blazing whiteness that surrounds us. Colours seem almost psychedelic against the vivid white blanketing snow. We walk by a small blue shed and I stare in disbelief at its blueness. A skip we pass seems to be the very definition of red, as if the colour had not existed before now. A switch has flipped and ordinary objects are suddenly extraordinary. Between my feet, writhing, wraith-like snakes of blowing snow twist along the frozen ground, swirling in and out of existence. The crunch of the metal studs under my boots seems to crack the crisp air.

These familiar surrounds are sharper and cleaner, otherworldly in the intense cold and I stop to absorb the strange reality in which I find myself. In the distance, the cobalt sea glitters restlessly beneath a shadowy sea smoke that winds across the white-clipped water. A halo of powdery blowing snow, like a tuft of wispy white hair, blurs the otherwise razor-sharp edge that clips the mountain top from a pale icy sky.

The whole world seems as if it could shatter into a million mirrored shards of light and sound and colour, connected only by the cold that binds it all.