Far from Winter
I was where I am when the snow began. I had become used to the difference in weather, Missouri’s hot summers and mild winters in direct contrast to Western New York’s mild summers and snow-laden winters. I saw many hundred-plus days during my first summer here. And that winter? Two or three inches of snow on a thirty-degree day meant plowed streets, but with typical forty-five-degree weather it melted in a day.
But that day was different. Heavy flakes of snow were falling, and it was accumulating. Fast. Within three hours, we had ten inches of snow on streets that had just seen rain. It wasn’t going anywhere soon.
People around here might have experience driving on black ice, but they forget that it’s still there when they see snow. Watching them drive was one more reminder that I wasn’t in New York anymore.
This is my response to Prosery: Winter is Coming, the prompt from Merril at dVerse ~ Poets Pub, where the challenge is to write a prosery, flash fiction or creative nonfiction, with a 144-word limit (here, exactly 144 words). Included in the bit of prose is to be a complete line from a poem. For this prompt, the line is from The Dead of Winter, by Samuel Menashe:
“I was where I am
When the snow began”