The Tube of Winter
The opening paragraph of Bear by Marian Engel:
In the winter she lived like a mole, buried deep in her office, digging among maps and manuscripts. She lived close to her work, and shopped on the way between her apartment and the Institute, scurrying hastily through the tube of winter from refuge to refuge, wasting no time. She did not like cold air on her skin.
I like this Canadian writer's "tube of winter" because that's exactly how I experienced winter when living in Quebec: flitting from place to place, usually through the same exact "tubes," taking in little, almost blinkered, trying to get to the end of the cold journey.
The tube is metaphorical or perhaps mystical, but sometimes it's also literal because of the corridors one passes through in the so-called "underground city," a network of interconnected subway stations and subterranean shopping malls: these passages are often slippery and and grey from the snow-slush walked in by other scurrying pedestrians.
One one occasion, while "scurrying hastily through the tube of winter," I got felt suddenly like a piece of windblown litter. I decided I did not to live like that anymore and that we'd have move to somewhere else.