Winter’s end
‘Lower temperatures and rainy conditions,’ says the forecast for tomorrow.
Lower temperatures? They cannot be much lower than they were yesterday morning. The grass on the north facing hillside was white with frost. It seemed such a change that I actually stooped down to touch the frost, to assure myself that it was not my imagination. From eighteen degrees of late, the high tomorrow is forecast to be just eight degrees.
It was neither a particularly cold nor a particularly wet winter, but it seemed a particularly long one that has not yet ended. Hopefully, by Easter, there will be a day when the winter ends.
‘When the winter ends’, the lady had said that the last time I had seen her.
Living in sheltered accommodation, she was reclusive. Her main interest in life was her son, whose occasional appearance were the moments for which she lived.
‘He’ll come to see me’, she said, ‘when the winter ends’.
There had been a momentary temptation to point out that he lived in Belfast, less than thirty miles away, and that, although it was January at that time, the weather was mild and dry. But what was the point in causing unnecessary upset?
‘I was going to come when the winter ended’, he said when I met him.
His car was parked outside her house; the undertaker had just left.
The police had phoned me that morning, they believed something had happened to her and they would like a clergyman present when they forced the door.
The woman’s body was lying on the hearth rug, the paper she was twisting as fire lighters still in her hands. The heart attack that had taken her must have been sudden and massive.
The funeral had been respectably attended, the son’s presence brought friends from Belfast uninhibited by the thought that it was still winter.
What went through his mind as he sat in the front row with the coffin a few feet away? Maybe he believed his own story, that driving from Belfast in winter months was hazardous – despite the fact that our area had an abundance of people who drove to and from the city for their daily work.
I never saw or heard from him again. A furniture van came and removed her few pieces of furniture and it was soon as though she had never existed.
When will the winter end? Perhaps winter is more a state of mind than a meteorological season.
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