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Bright-glowing cheeks; numb fingertips; hot coffee.
Trousers drying on a heater.
Soft crisp footsteps. Gleaming cobblestones. Churchbells on the approach to the river.
The swirling gusts now visible, the swirling snow. That wind, that wind, ever stronger on the approach to the river.
A lone piper. Black-coated figures hurrying across the river. The placid Garonne agitated in the fog, the swirling gusts, the snow.
The snow, the snow.
Winter came to rescue me today. Northland child lost in the south of a foreign place, today I was rescued by Winter. This snow, this wind, this cold on my face (my smile lifted to the sky, I am the only person in these streets, on this bank, this bridge, who does not bow into the wind, I and only I spread my arms wide and laugh, and laugh, rescued, I alone) recall another me, Northern child walking in another, Northern snow another night, another me who understood that snow is the true sense of solitude, and that she would never be lonely in winter.
And because it is the first snow, I take up a certain battered paperback and with attentive fingers turn the pages until I come to the very last one.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark, mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe, and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
