Where Winter Devours: Part 1

As the flurries poured down, she grew more certain of what she’d find.

Hi there,

Happy Sunday, and cheers to warmer weather ahead. Here’s the first installment in a new series. This story is a little bit scary and deals with death, so beware!

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The winters of my childhood were fierce and raw.

When the nor'easters came, it snowed all day and all night, and I’d look out at the block of white packed against the windows and imagine our house was an Arctic ship moving, inch by inch, through blue-hued seawater.

The ancient trees lining the road sagged under the weight and drooped toward the center line, creating long tunnels of white that only the bravest hill-dwellers (my mother at the helm) would drive through to reach town. Eventually, their limbs snapped and dropped onto the power lines, cutting us off from electricity for days.

This was when winter curled its finger like an old witch, beckoning us away from the house's now darkened corners and into the space of togetherness.

We kept antique oil lamps for nights like this. Before lighting one, I’d watch my own eyes in the glass, then turn the smooth metal dial to stretch the flame taller, brighter, until it illuminated the faces of my whole family huddled around the coffee table, until I could no longer see myself.

There, we told stories and ate baked beans in the lamp light. I read Franz Kafka aloud, a story about a man who wakes up as a giant insect, and I swear I saw his morphing silhouette in the shadows on the wall.

Winter had taken our connection to the outside world but brought us deeper into each other. Without electricity we were a unit; something whole.

Even then I understood the secret gift of it.

***

That the cold could also be dangerous was a looming threat, and the same spirit that conjured my family’s oneness could rip others apart.

One evening when I was ten, in the middle of a snow storm, my mom, brother, sister, and me were bustling in the warm, golden light of our kitchen when we heard a frantic rap at the door. We opened it to the dark night and saw our neighbor Jamie, two years older than me, standing on the porch with his mouth agape. His body was rigid, as if in shock. 

“I think my uncle might be dead,” he’d said.

Jamie’s house was next to ours, but his uncle lived on a farm on the other side of the creek behind us. I’d never gone into Jamie’s uncle’s house, but when my mom had stepped in years before, she’d been taken aback. 

“It looked exactly like ours,” she’d said, shaking her head in disbelief. She had no doubt that the same person built both farmhouses by hand a century prior.

On the day Jamie came knocking, his parents weren’t home, and my mom was the only adult that could help. She had no choice but to trek through that waist-deep snow, the rock in her heart weighing heavier with every step.

As the soft flurries poured down from the indigo night, silencing the world around them, she grew more certain of what she’d find. 

The light was on when they got to the barn. On the floor between the rows of cows, illuminated by the bright overhead light, the man was face down in a puddle of blood. 

He’d had a heart attack while tending to the animals, and even if he could’ve called out or dialed 911, his body would’ve frozen before help could come.

We lived in identical homes and endured the same cruel winter, but he was the one it took.

***

The first winter I spent in Denver seemed easier than the ones of my youth.

It’s true that there were days when it snowed from dawn until dusk, and week-long stretches where the ice enveloped every outdoor surface: roads, sidewalks, porches, and cars coated in a slick, clear layer. One morning after a storm, I stepped onto the front porch just in time to see two women cross country skiing down the middle of the driverless road.

But even when the mile high city is swaddled in snow, sunshine is guaranteed: The promise of blue skies and t-shirt weather will always come tomorrow, if not today. After four years like this, I was convinced that winter in Colorado was easy. 

That all changed one day in February, when I walked into the woods. 

(to be continued…)