2025-11-12

I enjoy it because I can always go back. The way my fingers grow cold and numb, the bite of the wind on my cheeks, snow melting in my boots. I enjoy them because not a hundred yards behind me is the roaring fire that Edna keeps. She will make me a warm cup of tea and the fire will cook my bones. But now I’ll go out into the snow and let it melt against my gloves and I’ll be unafraid of Dylan’s snowballs. We’ll create our forts and form alliances (I’ll always pick Ford who has been most good to me) and craft arsenals. Then and only when the activity stills and we hide ducked behind our fortresses and the yard becomes a still life, silent save for the wind blowing white wind against patches of bare earth, then from the field comes a high lob, a shooting star which we lose against the sun, and then comes the voices and shouts and zing of snowballs past my ears. Ours is a plan of attrition, hard-packed missiles meant to tear down the walls of our enemies. Bernard preferred a tactical approach, exposing himself in between firings to find new angles or weak points in their walls. He took risks as he always had, and I thought well of him but also thought him a fool, exposing himself to the attention of the other boys for whatever gain he could find. I had an extra volley in hand for him, for one had to act quick in matters of circumstance. Every winter we had to learn, again and again, our patterns and acts of war, and each spring we could forget again.

We were the ones left behind, anyways, the ones without homes to return to. Our families would not remember us, so in our winter days we would remember each other, holding others’ works and days until the thaw when we could at least be remembered by the mass of our schoolmates and teachers, remembered for what we were supposed to be and not for our tactics and schemes, for what was so incidental in us. We were only boys then, boys who still needed to be held yet were in this moment, for our moment in the sun, learning to make our own selves, our own chances, in the ways we knew how.