The Weight of Winter

I remember the morning the power went out in our old farmhouse. I was seven, and the world outside had been erased by a sudden, heavy blanket of white. My father didn’t reach for the radio or fret about the driveway; he simply grabbed a plastic lid from the kitchen bin and pulled me toward the back field. We didn’t have a proper sled, but it didn’t matter. The air was so sharp it felt like needles against our cheeks, and the silence of the snow was absolute, broken only by the sound of our own frantic, happy breathing. We spent hours turning that field into a kingdom of tracks and laughter, forgetting that the house was cold or that the world beyond our fence was waiting for us to grow up. It is a strange thing, how the most fleeting moments—the ones where we are just moving, just feeling, just alive—are the ones that anchor us to our own histories. When was the last time you let yourself be completely swept away by the weather?

Tisha Clinkenbeard has captured this exact feeling in her beautiful image titled Fun Sledding in the Snow. It is a reminder that joy is often found in the most improvised of circumstances. Does this scene bring back a winter memory of your own?