Snow Day

by Laura Williamson

The thing about snow is it tricks you. There’s always one morning in early winter when you wake up to a world that is white and you think, snow day!; then you race outside only to find your slippers sink no deeper than the height of their soles. “Snow,” my dad would say, “is traitorous.” And he would place a hand inside the collar of my pyjama top and guide me back inside. Today, though, the flakes are falling so thick I can’t see the other side of the road, and when I think of what I’ve done to you, I am nothing but thankful for the way a snowfall obliterates everything, erases footsteps, muffles sound. Stubbornly burying what I’ll never undo, and everything you’ve left behind.

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Laura Williamson is a Canadian freelance writer and editor based in Wanaka, New Zealand, where it rarely snows.