Hoarfrost

In the heart of the Red River Valley, in the city of Winnipeg, CA, before winter had even officially begun, Hafed and I braced against a biting wind. The stark streets (purely northern their utility) offered no hope against the sting. We trudged by the art museum. Large black statues outside were unimpressed by the cold and unsympathetic to our plight. They sat like pharaohs, almost facing each other but really looking over one another’s shoulder to eternity. They are stone, after all, and unflinching, generally unconcerned with here and now. In contrast, We are flesh and crumpling in the wind. We are shedding and wearing down, and our bodies exert their all trying to repair the damage, to stave off inevitability. They fail, as a matter of course, and they fail quickly - the blink of those statues’ stone eye. Of course, the same happens to stone. It just seems that the statues understand something more than I about the metamorphosis of wrought time on flesh. We are ghosts, fleeting impressions; we are entropy incarnate; we’re formless energy condensed into a matter frost, waiting to evaporate again into the sunlight, vacuum fog.

Hafed and I scuttled along dragging our suitcases to a final day of customer meetings, resigned to the pain that comes from cold: the atomic loss of energy, the squeezing atoms, the crystal sharpness of freezing water, the absolute and ultimate rebuttal of our human nature.

That morning, before feeling the Canadian wind, as we sat in morning blear waiting for breakfast to be served, Hafed commented on the thick fog blanket permeating the city. I hadn’t noticed it till he mentioned it. Later, on the sixteenth floor of 444 St. Mary’s Avenue, I looked out and saw it’s beautiful effect. The elm trees as far out as the eye could see were frosted white. Every twig, coated in sugar. The ordinary at scale often produces breathless wonder. “It’s the hoarfrost,” said our host. “We see it just once, maybe twice, every winter.” I considered the odds, and decided it was my lucky day.