January 22, 2009, three days before the Spring Festival.
Jiang Muwan and Gu Jiangnian had a disagreement about how to spend the Spring Festival.
But this disagreement ended in the afternoon.
The snow in '09 came neither too early nor too late.
In the tea room of the Gu Mansion, the buzz of conversation abruptly stopped because the person leading the discussion was facing the French windows, and the snowflakes entering his field of vision had caught his attention.
Xu Fang and others followed his gaze and saw that outside the house, snow began to float down, tiny and dense flakes falling from the sky without warning.
The sharp decline in temperature from yesterday's bright sunshine to today's chill had been in anticipation of this snowfall.
Gu Jiangnian noticed it too.
He was sitting on the side, holding a cup of coffee in his palm, emitting a faint wisp of steam, watching the snowflakes flutter outside the window, and wondering if that shrew had seen it yet.
