Now the winter is about snow. When you are lucky enough to time it right, the world is bluest blue. If water is green when you see enough of it, air is blue. Air that is giving you a peek into the very marrow of the universe. You are touching, however fleetingly, the deep indigo of the absolute darkness of deep space. Of nothingness and everything. Of bone-chilling cold.

We think of blue, in English, as a state of unhappiness, or perhaps longing. Mood Indigo (Duke Ellington/Barney Bigard/Irving Mills, 1930, here sung by Ella Fitzgerald)

To me, that flat and deep blue of twilight holds the promise of a night of snow sparkling white and blue and beauty itself, offering cover to creatures that do not have a house with two stoves and a dog to keep warm — from which to look, breathlessly, into the stillest night at 1 am when it is time to put some logs on the fire.