Winter’s Blizzard
He loved snow.
Most days, when the crystalline beauty would fall, he would dress up, beanie on his head comfortably, coat wrapped around him like a toasty blanket a mother gave her child. He always had to have three layers on, said it made him feel snuggly and warm, especially in this kind of weather.
Then, he would take me outside, persuading me that it was wondrous weather, that I needed to experience snow, to learn to love it like any other sane human, and I would dress myself up in as many layers as him and follow him outside, lips twitching and heart burning so warm that I feared it may have melted the sheets of icy goodness that layered the ground.
We would make snowmen — that was one of his favorite things to do. He would get a tiny ball of snow to start and he would look at me, cheeks flushed from the bitter cold already, and say, “Well, come on! Snowie isn’t going to make himself!” Then, he would roll it up and he looked so young, so free, like he didn’t have a care in the world.
I would have felt like a monster should I have wiped that grin off his face.
So I rolled up the abdomen — that was the roll he always gave me — and I put atop his own bottom pile. We both worked on the making the head and then when we finished that, he was in charge of accessories while I worked on his limbs.
