“Love in a… Cold Climate”…

“Le temps…

Aujourd’hui”…

The weather…

Is… minus zero…

Today…

Paris… froze…

It’s… Siberia…

I have a rendezvous… with the love of my life…

Wearing my… Russian fur toque hat… armed with heavy boots, warm gloves…

I braved… the chill… by tentatively stepping out of our gate… into the street…

“Dans la rue”… I plunged… into a white world of… frozen beauty…

SNOW…

“J’adore… la neige”…

That silent world… of endless white spaces…

The hush… breathtakingly beautiful…

Snow-laden, slate-gray Parisian rooftops… with smoke vaporizing out of chimneys… conjuring images… of love and bonhomie…

Icicles… like sharp sculptures piercing down… from the elegant and ornate “marquise” canopies …

Majestic… branches of trees… heavily pregnant with snow…

Lovers kissing… people playing… children skating…

“J’adore”…

A wonderful state… of being…

Existing…

An exciting state… of lightness…

A world… of whiteness…

“Mon rêve”…

“Back to the Ice Age”… the headlines terrorized… “It’s going to be minus 10°… 14°… 20°…”

“La difficulté majeure”… warned the French “Le Figaro”…

The “big freeze” in Europe… with falling temperatures as low as minus 12°… icy as the Himalayas…

In Rome… blizzards of snow forced the closing of the Colosseum… Florence and Sienna were also covered with snow…

In Amsterdam, the upper lake froze… a bonus for skaters…

Sarajevo… paralysed by snow…

In a Swiss town near Geneva… the waves from Lake Geneva were turned into ice…

In the South of France… freezing temperatures plummeted below – 20°.

“Mon… Dieu”…

“Sacre… Coeur”…

“Enfin”… with my warm breath freezing in the icy cold… I glimpsed sight of my rendezvous…

The tall… lanky… peppery-white-haired man got out of his black-on-black “quatre-quatre”…

He swept me … trembling with cold… into his arms…

Blissfully… holding me close…

Into the warmth… of his being…

The world… stopped still…

Two people…

Two hearts…

Madly… in love…

In… a cold… cold… climate…

At… that moment…

The… ice…

Melted…

a.