END-YEAR INTROSPECTION:

I miss you... and you, and you...

SNOW

What is snow? Wikipedia tells me it's "a precipitation in the form of crystaline water ice"... that I already knew, but what IS snow? What does it represent? What does it entail? What are the metaphorical allusions that come to mind when crystaline water ice is precipitating upon oneself? Having resided all my life within the tropics, minutes away from the imaginary horizontal division of the globe, I have never lived a winter. I live almost 3,000 meters up in the sky, but because of our close and direct relationship to the sun, there is no snow around here... Sure, there are snow covered mountains and volcanoes, but that crystaline-water-ice thing never precipitates anywhere near any thirdworlder like me would dare reside... Anyways, I have a blank space where there should be a 'snow context'... In the north, snow could arise thoughts of Christmas. In the south, June-July... I don't know. But now, near the end of 2007, snow has brought something to mind: all those people that are away from home, experiencing these end-year holidays under flakes of snow, in distant lands, new countries, different cities, strange customs...

***
She dances under that glorious new artifact of nature, the snow, apparently alone... But what she doesn't realize -not fully at least- is that she is not alone. We close our eyes and see her footprints in the frost and her breath dance unevenly and eventually vanish into the dark. We hear her laughter and feel her voice tremble when she is sad. She smiles a lot, on account of the snow, and many other things, and that makes us smile too.

Love you mila.