The Winter of Our Thirteenth Birthday

Oola Breen-Ryan

Grade 6

In the winter of our thirteenth birthday, it was summer. November had come and gone, and we were halfway through December, but it hadn’t snowed once, and we were starting to get nervous. 75º in the winter wasn’t to be laughed at. The weather clearly wanted to be taken seriously, and nobody dared question her. But we questioned it anyway, and the question gnawed at our minds and our hearts until we were scared it would just destroy us from the inside out, so we tried to forget it, but nobody really did. We just pretended to, so we could act like everything was normal even though it wasn’t, even though not once had it snowed since last February, even though we had been waiting for a month for the cold to come and swirl around us and make us feel like, maybe, it was winter, not this neverending, confused summer.

In the winter of our thirteenth birthday, the frst cold front came twenty two days into December, twenty two days longer than we’d hoped and wished for. The weather let her guard down, and all of our praying convinced the cold to come, and it came, in the dead of night, when nobody was awake, and the cold rustled through the rooms and the blankets. When we woke up, the ground was cold, and the air around us was like a knife when we snuck outside, still in our pajamas, wondering if this was the cold that we had been waiting for, and it was, and it wound around us and made us shiver, and for a minute, we hated it so much we forgot it was what we had wanted for so long for. Then we ran inside, and grabbed books and blankets, and fully embraced the delayed winter. We wished it would last forever, but we knew it would only be here for so long, so we made hot chocolate and spice cookies and just spent hours staring out of the frosted glass.

In the winter of our thirteenth birthday, it began to snow at exactly six-o-clock, just late enough that you would have to squint to see the snow, but it was there, and it quickly covered the ground, painted the world, dusted houses with powder, cast long, dark shadows into the night.

In the winter of our thirteenth birthday, we smiled, and laughed, and you leaned out the window to try and catch snowfakes on your tongue, and, for a moment, everything seemed so perfectly cliche, the icy window, the cold seeping into the room, the crackling fre, and the snowfakes steadily falling outside.