Ferns on Glass, Wings in Air

“Beauty is fleeting, yet each vanishing carries the promise of return.”

I used to wake before anyone else, creeping to the window with a child’s quiet hope. Indiana winters had promised something I’d never known before: snow. Each morning after the air had turned sharp, I pulled back the curtain to see if the world had changed overnight. Sometimes my mother was already in the kitchen, beginning the long preparations for Thanksgiving dinner, but the rest of the house was still asleep. I pressed my fingers against the windowpane and startled at the shock of cold. Frost feathered the glass into white ferns, fragile and secret. Once, I touched them, and watched them vanish under my fingertip, dissolving into water. That was the first lesson of winter: beauty was fleeting, and I could not hold it still.

By the time the sun rose higher, I wasn’t alone. Jennifer and Christopher bundled up beside me, and together we pushed our hands into the wet, heavy snow. It clumped into rough shapes, sticking to our mittens, soaking through to our wrists. We learned by instinct what we had only ever seen on television: roll it, press it, turn it. Slowly, a snowman began to take form. The bottom ball was enormous, nearly three feet across, its edges uneven from the work of three children straining against its weight. The second ball was half its size. We heaved it up the side of the first, warping the shape as it went, but managing to balance it in place. The third ball, no bigger than a head, was beyond our strength. That was when my father stepped out into the cold. At six foot four, it was nothing to him. He lifted the head and placed it neatly on top, as if it had been waiting for his hands all along.

We dressed the snowman the way children do, by offering up whatever we could spare. Walnut shells pressed into its face, a crooked smile and wide-set eyes. Melissa arrived later, tugging off her scarf to drape around its neck. There were plenty of fallen branches scattered across the yard, so we found the longest, straightest ones and planted them firmly in its sides. One of my brothers even crowned it with a hat. For a moment it looked almost real, borrowed from our own lives and stitched together from laughter. My mother eventually came outside, shaking her head at our generosity, reminding us that mittens, scarves, and hats were meant for children and not for snowmen. We sighed, peeling back the layers we had offered, and the snowman stood bare again—dressed only in our joy.

By the end of the holiday weekend, our snowman had begun to sag. We watched him slump lower each day until he was nothing more than a small pile of broken snow, scattered and gray. I felt a pang of sadness, but not despair. I knew winter would return with more chances, more snowfalls, more beginnings. And it did. We built again—not just one snowman, but a family of them, complete with a throne. We raised walls across the yard for snowball battles, each of us throwing with the force of baseball players who had found their field at last. When storms came and the plows heaped mountains of snow at the bottom of our hill, we turned them into ramps that sent us flying into the air, shrieking with joy. Later we carved tunnels and chambers into the drift until we had made ourselves a snow house, a castle, even a mansion, lit from within by our laughter.

It was in that carved-out shelter that I found the bird. A storm had raged through the night, and in the morning a small, trembling body had taken refuge inside the hollow we had made. It did not resist my hands. I held it close, felt its heartbeat against my mittens, fed it until it was steady again. For a time, we were companions—creatures of winter, bound by the same fragile season. Then, one morning, we stepped out of the snow house together. The bird lifted from my cupped hands into the clear air, its wings cutting bright against the sky. I watched it go, carrying with it the truth winter had been teaching me all along: everything vanishes, but wonder returns—renewed, reshaped, ready to fly again.