nunoncastors

The daylight hours bleed away into tiny shards of half-light, drawing ever in on themselves as temperatures plummet and the skies fill with a cold grey malevolence that bears down sullenly on the world. Winter is here.

Once upon a time she was beautiful; crisp, and clear and bright, not the bedraggled spectacle we now endure. To glimpse her would wick away the breath and send shivers down the spine as though cold fingers danced about your skin. Look at her now; clad in dirty leaves and muddy smears, the grim spectre of Winter’s past, a crude imitation, shorn of silvery white and forced into tattered rags that bring a cold more biting for all that it is less clean.

I miss the Winter of old; the cold and ice and wonder of her, the light over snowbound fields, the frosty sparkle of her stars, the scent of the world beneath her tread. Yet it is her grey impostor that sits with me, shrouded in mists and rain beneath her cloak of grey, not Winter, not anymore.