Secret Pleasures
It is raining, dark clouds roll along the fjord, dropping their load of moisture over the wintergrey mountainsides. The white peaks shrink into the cloudy grey and granite black with every day of water eating at the edges of snow. Storms howl and throw sheets of water against the windows, and in the morning the world looks pared clean, scoured.

I walk to work, and listen to the rush of water from the flooded creek, see the lawns change colour in anticipating of the wild riotous green of spring, and I can smell the soil after months of frozen ground and only the salty scent of the sea. This is not what a winter should be: no white sheet of silky snow, no bright burning light reflected off pure frost crystals. I can not help it, I walk with a smile on my lips, enveloped in this premature reminder of delights to come.