 |
Rachel Joyce |
After their meeting, which may be a date but which may also just be something friendly, he opens the door to the van and it occurs to him they have lost an evening talking about the smallest things. She has told him she likes frost, not snow. The frost, according to Eileen, picks out each thing and marks it apart. ‘Whereas snow just dumps all over everything. And they don’t lay off the buses when there’s a frost.’
From now on, he will always like frost.
It is indeed a small thing, that Eileen prefers frost to snow, but it is these, he realizes, these smallnesses which make up the big ones. Besides, the big things in life do not present themselves as such. They come in the quiet, ordinary moments – a phone call, a letter – they come when we are not looking, without clues, without warning, and that is why they floor us. And it can take a lifetime, a life of many years, to accept the incongruity of things; that a small moment can sit by side with a big one, and become part of the same. (p 255)