Clouds of Breath / The 500-Word Project: Week 1
2013
Winter, 1986
Seven years old
Boots crunching through the fresh snow covering the backyard, I headed toward the woods, sunlight filtering down through the interlaced branches of the tall trees all around and up the hill. In the summer it would be shady here, only dappled light touching the ground through a roof of tremulous green. But now all was bare, and the sun reached down to touch most of the snow that had fallen the night before.
My brother and I had been out to play just that morning, but after lunch he’d stayed in the warmth of the house to watch TV while I’d felt the pull back outdoors.
My eye caught the plastic playhouse that had been there for several years and that we rarely used anymore. Its colors were faded by sun exposure, the decals puckered and starting to pull away. As I opened the small half-door I saw that only a bit of snow had drifted in, not enough to cover much.
The winter sunlight slanted in the window, reflecting brightly off the snow on the bank that sloped up just outside. I sat in the small plastic chair and looked out, gathering my arms to my body to keep warm. My breath puffed out in clouds and I played with them, making them bigger, smaller, bigger again, watching the clouds appear and disperse in the space of one exhalation.
My attention caught on the bare tree branches, the sun skimming off them in a way that made them shiny and reflective. The branches themselves were beautiful, naked as they were, locked together and coming apart with the breeze, a tangled web of dormant life. The way the sun fell on the perfectly fresh snow made it glitter, and there were colors in it dancing, almost twinkling, that I’d never before appreciated in snow. Flashes of green, pink, orange, blue, tiny crystals of color bounced their light over the early afternoon.
Stillness wrapped all around. I stopped to listen, trying to find anything familiar–a car, a TV, a human voice, the skittering of a squirrel. There was only the very slight rustle of the wind in the branches high above me.
And in that near-silence, a sense of deep and boundless peace overcame me. Everything–everything–shimmered and quivered with life. Everything had a current running through it, and it ran through me too. My body shivered, but not with cold–with recognition. With acknowledgement. With a feeling of seeing, of having been seen. With a feeling of knowing that I was part of all that was, that all that was was part of me. There were no words to it, no thoughts. Just feeling, just beauty.
I thought, I want to keep this, and that very second it began to fade, dissolving like a cloud of breath. Completely gone, as quickly as it had come, leaving a little girl sitting on a plastic chair in a plastic house, overcome with wonder and awe.