Every day it seems to grow colder, and the Indians at work ask hopefully if I think there'll be snow this year, and I say we'll have to wait and see. And then next week it's colder still, and they ask again about the snow, since they've never seen snow, and I say that it doesn't work that way; sometimes it gets colder, colder than you think you can bear, but still there'll be no snow; that's just how it is. And then, as still it grows colder, the Indians ask if it's always this cold here, and I say I don't know. Then they ask if it's usually this cold this time of year, but I don't know this, either. They ask what's the coldest it's ever been that I can remember, but the cold isn't something one remembers: one experiences it; one lives in it; one almost dies, it feels at times, in it. But like all things definitive it come without herald, and vanishes without trace; like all things definitive, its heartlessness is a kind of ruin.