hamur

It itches and crawls. Tonight she wants to peel her skin off and hang it on a hook, drape it over the back of a chair, fold it on top of the laundry pile. Any of these things. Would she float about like a mist without her skin or flow shapeless onto the floor? She isn't sure.

She wants to shuck it off like a salt-encrusted boot.

ósjón

There, between the slabs of concrete, floor and ceiling, a stripe of rain and fog, dark tree branches against it and through it.

(memories from the train on the bridge from Slagelse eastward, the view across the Bælt a claustrophobic stripe of Audenesque grays between water and cloud that made all Nordic minimalism snap suddenly into place---or is it always like that when you are traveling to the sickbed of a loved one?)

For a moment the soft gray is mist clinging to the hill, hiding houses, lush trees, the ridge above, all invisible in the wetness of it. It is a glimpse of a familiar unseen sight, a blind man's vision of home,
until the eye adjusts to the sheeting water and sees there is nothing behind it. The gray and rain goes on over trees and unfamiliar buildings and empty fields.

bókaormur

I loved those stacks.

The basement level contained treasures. I once laid hand on a leatherbound copy of Landnámabók with facing-page Latin translation; it had been printed in Boston for the King. Books that old didn't circulate. This was probably another way of telling us not to attempt walking off with any jewel from that hoard, lest the coiled serpent that rested there huffing and steaming leap into the air and wreak firey doom upon the town.

knirkende

It was the sound you noticed first, coming out the door, not the sight. You'd seen the snow through the window upstairs, feathery, neither wet nor dry, falling onto streets, footpaths, sidewalks, grass. The streetlights shone down onto it and it shone back up, illuminating the faces of the bundled people walking briskly on their whitened ways. So quiet, and every footfall creaked, the footfall of easily a hundred hurrying walkers. It sounded like a hundred windows creaking open on on oil-needy hinges, opening onto another place, and through those windows came still more snow.

hvasst

It's coming down sharp and wet under the streetlamps, making a crust over everything. You have to stamp your foot through with every step.

Earlier it was sugary, floury, light. Now it is sharp and wet; it is making new shapes at the edges of things. Where the trunk of a car curves downwards it has cut the snowcap into glistening angular pillars, white stuðlaberg.

stille

Two black bowls, radishes in one and eggs in the other. One of the eggs is brown; the rest are white.

kuldi

The snow lies on the streets here differently from anywhere else I have been. I am not sure I could tell you how.

Coming in from the wind, the tiny, striped muscles of my irises are too chilled to relax or contrast, and I cannot focus my eyes.

When the winter air gets inside is so cold it feels like water.