Snow

She looked out the window at the falling snow. The day was cold, but she didn't feel it, curled up under a mountain of blankets as she was. It was early morning, and she wouldn't be getting up any time soon. School would undoubtedly be cancelled due to the snow, which was already several inches deep outside her window. She wouldn't have gone into school today anyway. She shivered. The flu that had gone around the school about a month ago had finally caught up to her. The school had only been about half full for a few days, and there was still a high number of kids absent after that. She thought that she would be exempt from this bout, that she was immune because of her flu shot, but here she was, shivering under her mountain of blankets, groggy from the medication and hoping she wouldn't throw up again. She was sore all over. She noticed that her mother had been in her room to empty the trashcan by the bed. It was full almost to the brim with tissues last night from her runny nose.

She had already tried falling back asleep, but it was no use. Sleep was gone from her. She felt well rested, so this wasn't really a problem. She sat up then, drawing the blankets tighter around her shoulders. She wanted to get a better look at the falling snow. It fascinated her that each of the thousands of individuals flakes were different from each of the others. From behind the window, she couldn't make out their individual shapes, but she could imagine them. Six tiny arms branching out from the center, minuscule fingers branching off of those. Some would be more simple, others more intricate. Some would be barely there, others would be almost a completely filled in circle. Some would look like those that her elementary school teachers had their students make, others would be more complex than people would think possible for something of that small size. She folded her arms on the windowsill and laid down her head on them to be more comfortable in her snowflake-watching. Her forehead was almost touching the glass, and she could feel the chill from the outdoors seeping in.

After a few minutes of this, the blankets slipped from her shoulders, and she was forced to move from her previous position and retrieve it from around her hips on the bed. She was feeling quite warm now, but her mother had warmed her to keep the blanket on no matter what. Exposing herself to the cold would only prolong her illness. This happened a few more times: wrapping the blankets around her, them slipping off, her retrieving them and resettling herself until she became frustrated with the process. Resigning herself to the fact that she would not be able to stay comfortably in that position with the blankets around her, she laid back down and looked out the window from that less convenient position. This view was soon obscured by the snow piling up on the windowsill, but she didn't mind. She liked the way the snow settled there, in layers like rings on trees. Some layers were thicker than others, sometimes the width varied along the row, but it only made it more interesting to look it. It took a long time for the layers to form, but they looked like they had always existed as soon as they were established.

As she laid in her bed and thought about the snow, her thoughts wandered to the water that made up the snow. She started to wonder where that snow had come from, all the places it may have traveled. It may have fallen from the sky as a rare rainstorm in the middle of a dry, dry desert. That snowflake might have drifted in a cumulonimbus cloud over the sea, witnessing all manner of creatures breaching the surface. She thought about how this water was the same water that had existed for billions of years. Maybe these snowflakes had been snowflakes before, falling on the dinosaurs, or raindrops in the Amazon. Maybe they had melted from the glacier that sank the Titanic. There were as many possible histories for these snowflakes as there were snowflakes falling from the sky. She tried to think of every one of them, going through every event in history and every place on earth that she had ever heard of.

Her thoughts distracted her from her sickness for the time being, and she was perfectly content with what she was doing. Before she knew it, her mother came home on her lunch break from work. Her mother heated up some soup in a pot on the stove, and she got out of bed for the first time that day. Taking the blankets with her, wrapped around her like a cape, she ventured out into the kitchen. Through the large picture window at the front of the house, she looked at the snow-covered world outside. The front lawn was a pristine, glistening white, so clean and bright that it almost hurt her eyes to look. Every tree branch was outlined in the same sparkle, and she smiled automatically at the sight of it. She loved it when the world looked like this: untouched, with beauty covering every surface imaginable.

As she ate her soup, she smiled at the world around her. After her mother went back to work, she returned to her bed and continued to make up stories for the snowflakes that fell. The hours passed faster than she would have thought possible. Every story was different, getting more and more fanciful as she ran out of historical events to place the little white crystals in. As the day went on, she felt better and better, like her illness was slipping away with each new story she created. Before she knew it, her parents had returned home from work, and she was feeling as good as new.