spring, but not

today's the day that officially we are all supposed to have removed our winter nail-tires. It's appropriately ironic that today I woke up to a white world, and since then it's been snowing on and off. The view outside my office is one of those classic Icelandic days, the sky aswirl with clouds and pierced by gentle shafts of sunlight. A crowd of seabirds has just taken off and are reeling against

lay low in the snow

The snow is just warm enough to slide down the window in lazy ribbons, accumulating in fractals along the lower sill, and my trustily unreliable streetlamp winks and flickers as always. The air is unusually still, so the snow billows beneath the illumination in ways remembered from childhood. Across the street one tiny tree on a doorstep still twinkles with ice-blue fairy lights, left from