It feels like three years ago, that terrible year without spring or summer. That terrible month of June, its sad, bleak stretch of disappointment, the cold in your bones, the fog-horn mourning, the wet skies.

I think it’s happening again. It’s a bumper year for ice-bergs but I can’t bring myself to say a good word about them. I blame them for the frost warning tonight, this 11th night of June 2014, and the long deep winter still with us like a curse, calling a halt to the inching forward of green in the grass and the trees, their shrinking buds wrapped tight against the chill.

On Saturday past the temps hit 20 and oh, the difference in the way you carry yourself and spring out of the car, arms loose and easy without a coat, no woolen thing or hood clutched around the throat, no hands pinched and raw. All the air around you isn’t punishing you anymore, it’s warm like your body and here’s the sun, hot and delicious on your pale, pale face. People appear on the streets. They behave like people in pictures of popular tourist locations, smiling, chatting at the street corners, waving from open car windows, ambling along the sidewalks, not hurrying to get in out of it, no shoulders hunched against the cold, no face down sheltering from the spitting wind.

Today we beat all of North America for lowest temperature. Iqaluit, in the Arctic, was 5 degrees warmer.

Oh St. John’s, oh Newfoundland. I am so very tired of being cold.