Snowfall

I have always felt most at home in winter- bundled up in layers, muffled in the quiet that falls across the landscape with the snow.  Last year at this time I became a layer myself- wrapped around you as you grew in my womb.  I felt you slowly spinning, like a snowflake, and I knew you would share my love of this season.

Your father wouldn't let me take you out for the first snow of your life- said it was too cold for you, too cold for your skin like sweet summer roses.  We kept you inside, kept you by the fire, through that first month of your existence- but this year he has finally relented, and here we are, your face tilted up to the soft silver-gray of the sky.  And I watch the crystals gather on the perfect copper sweeps of your eyelashes and I know that I was right to bring you out here.

I lay you down on an old blanket, beneath the twisting limbs of the old cherry tree, just as I did last spring.  On that day the white petals fell on you with every passing breeze, and you waved them away with your baby laugh.  I thought they must have tickled you, the way that the snowflakes tickle me.  But you do not wave away this shower of white.

I sit and watch it gather on your body, becoming a pale coverlet atop the dark wool of your blankets.  Soon you are a just another small hill in the silent woods, the many soft curves of your body smoothed until they are one gentle mound of snow.

That's the power of snow- it covers everything, making even the most terrible things beautiful- or at least bearable.  I know I should have buried you in the earth, but I how could I have stood to look at that ugly scar, day after day?  Every day reminded by the torn up soil, the lack of growing things...  It is better this way- you will become part of winter, and when spring comes again you will melt away... and so will my grief.