Crow in the Snow

It’s suspiciously quiet outside.  Tuning in to the muffled whiteness of the world beyond the purple curtains, as soon as I note that I can hear no birds (despite it being mid-March) a crow answers me, twice.  Your fingertips on mine, heard through drifts of bedclothes, sound like ice floes shifting.  How does such delicate contact transmit through finger, arm, pillow and produce a sensation so great it fills my head?

We walk out to the ruined farm.  It’s coming down widdershins.  We’ve never seen snow so fine, so loose.  Sent on an east wind, it starts to pain our faces.  If we stood still we’d wear domed snow-hats like every fencepost.  John Bishop’s dilapidated house is lonely and lovely; snow is scudding through his missing roof and caking his fireplace, and the sycamores that ring what was his yard are catching whiteness in their lichen beards.

By the miners’ old ale-house I inhale a snowflake.  It goes down my windpipe like a torch down an adit, gutters out with a sharp metallic sensation in my lung.  The snow gathers on the horns of the black-faced sheep that cluster round the gate to be fed.  The road has gone from damp black to powder white.

Winding along the path through the woods, kicking a bow-wave of snow-spray ahead of my boots, I press my cheek against a gorse bush, displacing a pile of snow.  Deliciously soft at first, then the cold registers, enough to produce an instant headache.  My numb face fails to feel the thorns.

The next morning, I realise that when I move my fingertips on the wall of our white cave of bedclothes, the sound my ear receives through the pillow is the same haptic throb as yesterday’s pristine snow under our feet.