He stepped in a puddle and felt icy water slop over his shoe tops and seep between his toes. It might as well be winter. The only difference between summer and winter in Nova Scotia was that by winter all the leaves had been blown away. He crossed the quadrangle, stopped at Commons to pick up his mail and climbed the stairs to his tiny office. He was winded by the exertion, which annoyed, but didn’t surprise, him. He wasn’t getting enough exercise. He wasn’t getting any exercise. The weather had been so vile for so long that he hadn’t been able to swim or jog. He had taken pride in being a young fifty, but he was beginning to feel like an old fifty-one. He vowed to start exercising tomorrow, even in a whole gale. He had to. To go to flab would be to admit defeat, to accept the loss of his dreams, to resign himself to whiling away his days as a teacher. Some might say that academia was the graveyard of science, but Herbert Talley wasn’t ready to be buried just yet. Days like today didn’t help.
