Standing On This Seam Of Seasons

The yard is still piled with unraked leaves as autumn and winter collide today, midair. The snow outside is doing less falling and more floating, softening the day's gaze, offering an invitation to any who would watch the change that spins through cold-kissed air. Flakes have begun to gather in the contours of each shingle, dust the naked, upturned branches with their whiteness. It is easy to welcome change like this, to delight in the sudden gust that pushes flakes in a harsh diagonal, the flashes of red as Cardinals begin to play in the dark branches of the wintered Walnut outside my window. I am inside, and bundled against the cold.

The first time I remember seeing snow really fall, I had driven with a bus load of other 12-year-olds to a camp in the Sierra Nevada mountains. We could feel the temperature drop as we pressed our cheeks to the bus windows or traced hearts filled with initials onto breath-steamed glass. Dirty piles of snow began to trace the edges of the road as our leader announced that we were nearly there. When we piled off the bus it was dark except for the streetlights that lit patches of graveled road. And in the orange cast of each light flew snowflakes. I stepped away from the chaotic unloading and stared, as if each floating speck were a fairy, dancing its brief moment in the light before joining the others in the dark, on the trampled ground below. I stood and watched until my friends called loudly from the warm mouth of our cabin, calling me back to my numbing body, to how stepping into this beauty left me shivering-stammering cold.

A moth the color of dead leaves clings to the metal frame of my storm window. It beats its wings like sporadic breaths, its legs clinging fast despite the hard gusts of wind, the eddies of snow that brush against the pane. I leave my seat to stretch and rest my eyes, and when I return he is gone. The beauty of winter is fierce. This wind pushes ruthlessly, shaking windows, seeping in where seams aren't tight enough. The world has turned to cold. Standing on this seam of seasons, a new beauty finds me again, leaves me numb and breathless.