Gifts for the Snow Spirit
What treasures do we find and leave behind each year?
Every year the snow spirit trudges through the snowfields and stops outside my back door. The spirit always stares at me with its soft, hollow eyes and asks me the same question with its mouthless face.
Some years it is an easy question to answer: ill-fitting clothes or well-worn shoes - or maybe even a pesky cough I wish to be rid of. Other times the answer is less easy: a prickly love that still clings to my clothes. Or that one year when I found that waif of a kitten but couldn’t stop it from trembling. Whatever I give the snow spirit, it never complains. It just accepts my gifts into its white, doughy hands.
I am always worried that I will give away the wrong thing, something that I did not understand and should have kept. I wonder where the spirit stores all of these bits and bobs. Some days I imagine them stored in little glass jars where nobody can reach them and where they sparkle like treasures. But maybe it does not keep these things at all. Perhaps it takes the things we were not ready for or could not understand and finds them new homes.
Standing outside with the spirit, I tremble. I pull back my hand. Some day I will walk alongside the snow spirit and journey far beyond the snowfields, but I know that there are still so many treasures left for me to find and so many gifts left for me to give.
About the Creator
Benjamin Lopez Barba
Benjamin is a lover of dragons and time machines. He studied architecture and computer science in college which fueled his love of world-building. Today you can find him tinkering in the metaverse and cosplaying as a wizard.
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