Small observations.

When I was traveling over the Midwest from California to Pennsylvania, everything I could see was covered by snow. It was snowing in Pittsburgh when the plane came down. From Tuesday to Friday evening it snowed, never stopping for more than an hour or so, sometimes hard and fast and sometimes soft and slow, but continual and gradual, with several inches piling up in just under a day. I didn't spend much time out in it - I'm getting my feet under me after a long vacation - but when I was out getting groceries on Wednesday, I picked up a little bit and rubbed it on my face, and ate it. I've been stopping to look at snow a lot, now that there's plenty of it to see, and I'm amazed nobody talks about snow's texture too much. It's not smooth at all, no matter how much it looks that way: it's all textured, delicately shifting each time a new flake hits the rest, and when the wind whips up the top layers get blown around. Because it's what I know, I thought of sand, and I know if someone were to see sand after snow, they'd make the opposite comparison.

When I was waiting for the bus on Thursday night, I stopped to look at the shadows on the snow. My school has a few lampposts around in the old hexagonal style, and everything was coming down hard and fast in big flakes; I stopped to watch it under the main streetlights, and thought that everything was moving so fast it might as well all be still. I couldn't really communicate how much I loved what was happening to the other people waiting with me, and one laughed when I called snow exotic. When she said I was enjoying everything too much, even the snowplow, I told her I had to enjoy it for the both of us.

The sun came out today, which depressed me: that meant warmth, which means ice. But it's early enough in winter I know it's going to snow again. When it does, I need to go out to a park and play in it. Really play, properly, even if there's no one to do it with me.