Tiny ice pellets, smaller than grains of salt, are everywhere. Imperceptible in the air, barely noticeable to the skin, they fall upon the freezing mud as a disastrous spill from a overstuffed heavenly beanbag. The slightest stinging breeze huffles them together in a deep boot mark, at the edge of a black-iced puddle, on the back of a dog's black coat.
Of insufficient size to do much other than sit around on paths and benches, or decorate dog poo like an icing sugar topping, the haily phenomena is an innocent forewarning. The roar of winter has yet to be heard; these are the first flecks of spittle from its muzzle.
Three days before midwinter, the darkness seeks to overwhelm. Smoked clouds burrow the skylight – the sweating sun of July is a mere fantasy; a bizarre memory. Tumbling on, the frozen beads will leave no forensic footprint when -2 becomes +2. They will vanish being, by æstival days, a puzzling figure of old December's bleak remembrance.
"Thus with the year seasons return, but not to me returns day...
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose...
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men cut off"
Milton – Paradise Lost
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