Specimen: Year One

I had expected a flame. They had all promised a flame. What arrived instead was weather — a climate, daily, that I had to dress for, that did not consult me, that could turn between the kitchen and the stairs. Year one I kept catching myself surprised. I had married, I realised, a region, not a fire, and you cannot warm your hands at a region. You can only learn which way its wind comes from, and build the house with that wall thickest, and call the building of it, later, looking back, a kind of love — though year one I had no such word for it, year one I only stood at the window of us watching the front move in, not yet aware that I would spend four decades becoming fluent in one man's sky.