The first real winter

I’ve technically experienced winter before but never like this with snow and cold fingers and dragons breath and Oh! Beautiful dangerous icicles that hang from the rooftops. Like in a movie or a book or even a song I stand in the middle of it all, so transfixed I forget my own name. I see my house but is it my house? Surely it cannot be, or perhaps I just don’t recognize its winter clothes. I take a few steps towards the woods. When I moved here it was lush and green but now it is almost like a sketch. And to think I thought things strange then! If I had arrived when everything looked like this I wouldn’t have believed I was still one Earth. I began to venture into the bare trees, into the foreignness and I wonder how my mother liked the winter. She had to have thought it bleak to move to Texas, and then to Arizona, and then to New Mexico. She loved the sun more than anything, and did not care for anything else. She’d shut herself in on a rainy day and looked scornfully at dark clouds. Oh mother but how could you hate the clouds that brought this her, surely you couldn’t think this bleak? My hands are cold but the snow it so soft and strange that I don’t care! And surrounded by these strange paper and pencil trees, it’s like another world. But I remember I am everything she is not, so I merely venture further into the woods. I remember watching the movies that would come on at Christmas and wonder about this. It’s almost funny how I attributed the snow, icicles and cold hands to part of the fiction, fake as Santa. But mother wanted me to believe in Santa. It was she that put everything out in such a delightful way. She would make the magic seem real and probable . Yet she didn’t want me to believe that real winters, unlike our New Mexico ones, far from our New Mexico ones could be good, did she? No because when I told her about moving here she didn't understand. “Why leave everything familiar?” Well here I am, nothing familiar in sight, and I am just fine. And now I run out of the woods and towards my house, because who am I to abandon the heat?