Casino Royale is not to be, as it doesnât play at the local one-screen until 4pm. Since the temperature is only 24 degrees at the height of the day, we decide to head back to the condo rather than braving the re-iced roads later in the afternoon.

As the sun dips below the horizon, I walk down a thin trail to the beach. Snow crisps and crackles beneath me. A trickling sheet of ice, where the snow has melted and refrozen, encases a steep road paralleling the path. Itâs so cold that Iâm having trouble breathing. Having braved fifty below winters, my friends from Alaska would laugh at that last sentence.

Reaching the strand, I tramp across a formerly verdant park towards the water. Tall, wiry grasses struggle through the ice in clumps. I sway atop a snowy dune, buffeted by weather off the ocean. A copse of windblasted pines is to my right, but whitecaps off the Sound are to all other sides. In the failing cobalt light I can see a bridge in the far distance, linking an island with the dark peninsula. The sun goes down and I turn to leave. My hands are so cold that my thighs burn like kilns through the thin material of my pockets. A news report later shrills that the windchill-adjusted temperature hovers around zero. My parents cue up an uplifting movie about an abused child killer in South Africa to watch in the freezing gloom. The weather has clearly driven them masochistically mad.