We play in the snow

After a snow storm on the prairie, just the ordinary ones where you go to bed and in the night it falls and the day is gray next morning, the prairie is still. Cold. The most silent it ever gets. No wind, not even a whisper of it in the trees.

And about three o'clock in the afternoon, I pull on boots and coveralls and gloves, and head out to the sled pit. The grass lies slanted through the snow and the clouds are all rumpled over the horizon. The plowed field covered in snow, but you can see the dirt brown ridges in the soil poking through. The hills lie gray, running black with streams of trees all up and over them. And there's a little yellow house just across the way, surrounded by pines. Way over the prairie to the neighbors, cattle spot the snow, and the ground nearly matches the sky. Everything is this blue gray color that can only be found on a day in November.

I sit down in the snow and long prairie grass, my feet tucked up under me, and just look and listen to the silence of it all. It's my favorite view, up on Watch Hill. Ethan named it. Cause you can see so far and watch for so long. And when you can just sit and hear nothing but your breathing and watch a prairie under snow and feel the silence, you wonder how you could have missed living in such a place, and why hadn't I noticed sooner? How beautiful life can be when you just sit and listen to it breathing inside you, a whole world surrounding you?

It makes you never want to leave, you can never get enough of it. But I hear their voices down the hill, my siblings traipsing up with the sleds, wondering where I am. I smile cause I'm there ahead of them. Their voices sound so hollow, but so near in the silence, with no wind to wisp them away.

They bring the sleds and we play in the snow. I fall head over heels and big sister comes after work. And we watch the boys wrestle in snow and she says, "Snow is good for boys to get the boy out." Some days it's good to look out through your own eyes, you can see so much more that way.