Snowflakes

I wrote this last Friday when we were still frozen and white.  Now we have rain (?) and puddles with the sound of gurgling rain gutters at night.  But, winter isn't over yet ... 

We've reached that moment of winter when we lose the magic of a snowflake.

The days barely creep above 20 degrees and the street out front has only just been cleared of the snow from before Christmas.  (Look!  We can see the asphalt!)

The yard is hibernating beneath several inches of brittle snow - crunchy with sharp edges.

The sky is cloudy, but no promise of fresh snow, fluffy flakes, or powdered sugar falling from the sky.

It's the blah of winter ... cold, colorless and crisp.

So to help us appreciate that white arctic blanket that still covers us, a little tale about a snowflake ...

I shiver, feeling an arctic blast billowing through the frozen cloud, twisting my sister ice crystals and me sideways.  We six link arms (and toes and elbows and knees) in a peculiar game of Snowflake-Twister, spinning and spiraling out of our cloud home toward the snow-covered earth below.  Laughing and giggling, we float past a tussle of boys, our brothers, engaged in a six-armed thumb wrestling match and soon we spy the frosted branches of the evergreen trees.  A surprising gust of air tosses us in a loop; we squeal and cling to one another, watching the winter wonderland spin around us.  And then we stop, perched on the tippy-top of a blue spruce and I hear my mother exclaim, "My Girls, how you sparkle!"

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This was written along with my mini-writing group of elementary school girls in response to what we learned last week about snowflakes.  We discovered that snowflakes are always six-sided, formed by ice crystals bonking together and that they form in different patterns depending upon the temperature.  We had just five sentences to describe the life of a snowflake, from the sky to the ground.