Winter Getaway

It's cold, first thing that I wake. And it's hard to get out of bed. The warmth of it pulls me back in more, even after convincing myself of getting up. I slowly start to pull myself up and let my feet hang out. The cold air hits my feet as soon as they’re out of the blankets and I’m tempted to put them back in, but I force myself to jump out of bed. My feet hit the ground and below it, is a thin rug, thin enough that I can feel the coldness of the ground through it. Immediately it feels like my feet are numb, but I get used to it eventually.

           I walk across the room looking for my big knitted wool sweater and at the door, there’s a knock, “Luna come outside, the first snowfall is happening right now.”

           “Coming!” I say running to the door and opening it quickly. The first face I see in the morning is Alex’s and she has a grin on her face, jumping up and down like a little kid on Christmas day.

           She takes my hand and pulls me to the wide spread of a window that we have, and snow was falling right before my eyes. I’ve been able to see snow fall a couple of times, but the only chance that I get is once every 3 years or so. Or maybe even more than that, so just watching falling snow all over again, gives me that feeling that I always get. A sense of peacefulness and serenity. Watching, Kairo, a close friend of mine comes up from behind me and wraps a blanket around my shoulders, noticing that I’m slightly shivering due to me forgetting about grabbing my knitted sweater because of the level of excitement I had when hearing about the first snowfall. As he steps from behind me and to my right side, he hands me a semi-hot cup of hot cocoa. What better way than this would be perfect to start off the day while watching white flurries of snow fall.

           A couple of minutes in, and snow has covered the grounds and parts of the trees in a cascading white blanket. In certain aspects of watching the snow, sometimes it would glimmer and look shiny. That was one thing that I loved about watching snow, playing in it would be even better. After watching the snow fall for a little bit longer, I make my way over to the couch, and take little sips of my hot cocoa that Kairo gave me, holding the cup in between both of my hands. As the cup of hot cocoa is raised to my face, I feel the steam from the hot drink on parts of my face and smell sweet cocoa. Just the little things make me as happy as anything. Kairo comes to sit next to me and faces his back towards the large window, while he looks at me with a cup of hot cocoa also in his hands, and a smile on his face.

           “Did you want to play in the snow in a little bit?” he asks me.

           “Yeah sure, why not. I haven’t done it in a while, so I actually wouldn’t mind it.”

           “Perfect.” he says looking me in my eyes.

           His eyes are more than blue this time. They’re like crystals in the lighting that we’re in and they’re beautiful. The white snow accentuates his eyes and they work well together to illuminate the color more. Even in some fragments, there were little hints of grey as well, and I wonder where the color came from.

           My group of friends and I decided to take a vacation trip to the Blue Ridge mountains for our spring break, and this was our only chance of feeling cold before it’s back to blazing hot weather again. The cabin that we’re in belongs to my parents, and they agreed to let us use it for the week. You might think that there wouldn’t be anything to do in the mountains but that’s just the exact reason why we all went, to relax and rest our minds before the testing season.

           Just as Kairo and I finish our hot cocoa’s, we get dressed and ready for the day, to play outside in the snow. We’re both dressed in big puffy jackets and snow boots and look as cozy as ever. Walking out the front doors, there’s a blast of cold air that strikes my face and for a moment, my face freezes up. Striding on the snow floor, I get giddy and start to jump around with snow still falling, and landing into our hair, giving us white shiny specks.

I love seeing her this excited about something. It makes me happy that she’s happy, and it makes me smile when she smiles. As I’m looking back at her, she’s crouched down near the ground and I see her just admiring the snow. Her face lights up into an even bigger smile when she balls up enough snow to make a snowball and starts scrunching up because of how cold the snow is. I walk towards her, and she sees me coming, so she lifts her head and the hood of the jacket covers half of her face, only her smile showing.

“How are you doing over here?” I ask crouching down beside her as well.

“Great. I’m building a small snowman, want to help?”

“How about you finish with that, and I’ll start working on the bigger one.

“Ok!” she says giving me an even wider smile.

I start on rolling balls of snow and they’re just the perfect size to put together. And Luna makes her way over to me after finishing her little snowman, she waddles and it’s a cute type of waddle, like a penguin. She helps roll the other pieces to the snowman and I help her put the rolled pieces on top of each other.

“Hey guys!” we both hear from the balcony above us.

We look up, and see that Alex had spare buttons she brought just in case and a carrot for the nose of the snowman. She drops the items down to us and we use them as the finishing touches. Luna luckily found random sticks lying around and we used those as the arms. In my eyes, the snowman looked perfect.

“We did great on this.” I say grinning, holding up my hand for a high five.

“Yeah we actually did.” she says jumping to high five me back.

After playing around in the snow some more, they head back inside before their fingers got too numb, and once they walked through the doors their bodies instantly became warm again. Before taking off his coat and boots, he helped Luna out of hers first. She happened to touch his neck with her cold hands, and he jumped back in surprise of how cold her hands were. She laughed to his reaction and ran to the couch to bundle up in the many blankets there, and when she popped her head up, she looked like a burrito. He landed on the couch right next to her, and all he could see was her eyes, which was all that was showing through the blankets. And against the light and dark shades of the thick blankets wrapped around her, it gave the impression that her eyes seemed lighter than usual, he felt captivated by it. With the white background of snow blanketing the trees and the ground, her eyes looked like coffee. Light and warm, sugary sweet coffee. He liked thinking of the many ways to describe her eyes, and he liked the way her eyes changed in certain lighting to make him think these things.