Dear AnyOneGirl…

Dear Kate,
 
My first few years were spent in the snow. I like to remember our house as a log cabin at the bottom of a mountain; something out of a Laura Ingalls story. But memories from that age are more like a collage of imagination and photographs – reality buried somewhere underneath; a pile of tar and feathers. We most probably lived in a house that looked like everyone else’s.
 
I do remember being warm. My mother always kept a hot house. My father retells the story where she burnt through the bottom of our cast iron fireplace. Cast Iron! Burnt right through! The blacksmith had never seen anything like it.
 
I remember snow in thick soft carpets, but I do not remember snowfall. I remember spring’s sharp blue sky, yellow light melting on my skin like warm butter. I would ride my tricycle through dark green clumps of lawn just after dad had mowed, plastic pedals and bare feet coated in sticky grass. I would dread the cold-water hose at the end of those long afternoons.
 
Here, I watch the snow from a second story window, the cold pressed up like a shoulder on the glass. Sometimes it is softer than I imagined, landing in whispers. Sometimes it thrashes in circles and never seems to land, just keeps going and going, a flurry of white horses in a merry go round.
 
I like to watch the street for a while when the snow stops. Everything so clean, so black and white.
 
Love,
 
Amy.

Written by Amy Fraser of onislands