Winter of My Discontent

So here I sit in my winter wonderland buried under six cold inches of white. An unbiased snowfall started to blanket the biting grey world around three o’clock today. How does the beauty of something which is essentially not so much a color but an absence of color steal away this insipid season? It is the season of death. Yet even in death one can find beauty.
I took a walk in this storm outside earlier tonight. I decided to trek through the woods down toward the creek. I felt so blasphemous for taking the first steps into the newly fashioned world. How does one dare to take the first steps and disrupt such a pristine environment as the first snow? Sure, it may be okay after one has already seen the foot prints litter the walkways and such from little kids dragging their sleds behind, but to be the first?
Yet, on I walked passing the heavy hanging branches of deciduous trees on both sides of the trail, which had shed their leaves not long ago. I started to think how comical it was that the first snowstorm of this season coincided on the day in which my classes ended. At a fork in the trail down by the creek, I stood still, and looked backward up the hill which I just had hiked down. I stared longingly toward the deep tracks left behind in the snow. I was comforted though still felt an odd twitch of sorrow that the traces would be soon covered up from the fast falling snow.
A sense of urgency, maybe from the cold chill beginning to sneak in through my coat, I turned around again and thought about which direction to travel. Should I take the quick loop back toward the neighborhood, the route which lingers on round the creek for a bit, or turn around and head back the way I came, tracing the footsteps as to not spoil anymore of the beautiful landscape in the making.
I could not make up my mind. Either way I turned, there was going to be more snow, more cold, and more wet clothes freezing me to the bones. I hate the winter, I thought bitterly to myself. I knew the scene was beautiful and all, but at that point, standing alone in the middle of the woods, the woods which I knew like the back of my hand from playing every god damn day in as a child and adult, that I felt somewhat lost in my surroundings.
The skeletal branches drenched with snow seemed menacingly closer than they were when I first took notice of them, and I began to walk not knowing where my feet were taking me. Not knowing or caring if I ever got home again. The thoughts that occupied my mind were solely of the cold. My fingers were raw, my toes ached, my faced burned from the biting wind, and even my brain seemed to be boiling in the icy air.
The next thing I knew, I was shaking the snow off my boots, not knowing how I got there or cared. I was home. I threw off my boots, coat, hat, gloves, and ran up the stairs to crank on the shower and shed even more wet clothing. When I first jumped in the water, even the most tepid of water shocked my system and it felt like someone was sandblasting me with scalding water. Yet even after I was comfortable in the ever warming water, I still felt the chill from down in the woods. I hated winter at that point and could not care less if I ever saw snow again in my life. Sure it could be very beautiful, but the snow could also be very dangerous indeed. Just ask the commuters who sat in traffic on their way home today because of the abundant amount of accidents.
It is a horrible season, I thought to myself, but then recalled at that point, that it was only a season, a season, something in which we receive four of every year. A season is really a short space of time, and wouldn’t you know it, a season like winter would be gone just as quickly. Soon spring would be upon us, where everything begins anew once more. The snow all melts away, long after we are it has lost the brilliance and no color it once may have had at the beginning of its decent to earth. At once the chill that had lingered within me, long after I had come inside, subsided and I smiled thinking about the seasons soon to be.