Winter Morning

The wind howls, cold and lonely, every day blowing us deeper into darker mornings. The colder nights stretch themselves over the daylight hours. Thick dark clouds, like blankets, cover the sky. The weak, ineffectual sunlight, washy as watercolour turns the world pale. The horizon shortens as the world narrows and limits itself.

The gaze is lowered as the body hunches into itself against the cold. The wind blows rain against the face, Ice-needles.

Everywhere is too far to go.

I do not want to go out there, to walk through a landscape made alien by the winter weather. I do not want to go walking over the cold, hard, dead ground, beneath the skeletons of trees that shiver under the dull grey-uniformed sky.

Here we can sit, with a raging fire and hot drinks. We can be cosy together in the artificial warm, under artificial light, as the wind and rain batter futilely at the walls.

We will sit here warm and safe together as wind and rain knock on the window, eager to be let in.