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Jamie’s room got smaller. The local movie theater got shabbier. The trees grew shorter. The hills flattened, and summers were never quite so long, nor quite so short.
Jamie could match the walls he remembered with the corners he saw, and understand that the room with a ceiling he could touch was the one in which he had jumped on the bed with no thought of hitting his head. And he could overlay the dirty red weave of the theater seats with the shade of crimson velvet he had always seen because it should have been there. But he couldn’t look at the snow falling an inch or two at a time, getting pushed around in dirty gray heaps by reeking snowplows, calling out an army of trucks to befoul the streets with poisonous blue salt crystals, and make his memory agree that this was what winter had been.
All those things looked like loss. They seemed like the loneliest sights in the world to him, though he could never explain why.
“Maybe it’s just winter in general?” a friend would ask.
“Seasonal Affect Disorder,” another would say. “Started getting it as a teenager myself, that’s totally what it is.”
“Honestly, it should make you feel less lonely,” a third might say. “After all, with the roads clear, you can visit people more easily.”
“Didn’t it used to snow more?” Jamie would ask all of them. “Not that long ago.”
And they would shrug, and look away, and maybe say something about global warming. So Jamie had looked it up. These snowfalls that seemed so sad to him were precisely average for the area, going back at least fifty years. But the measurement station wasn’t too close to Burgess. And the way they looked away…
Jamie knew; he would bet his savings, his house, his car, his job, on it: it had snowed more when he was a kid.
He remembered breaking trails through plains of sparkling white, sinking up to his knees. He remembered sledding ramps slick as ice (made of ice) that felt like (that were) roller coasters (complete with loops) for his sled. He remembered playing crack-the-whip on ice so slick he might have really gone flying (had really gone flying) when he was at the end of the line. He remembered (someone) teaching him about the different kinds of snowflakes. He remembered the breathless magic of opening his window to see a world covered in thick, pristine white, glowing under a smiling full moon.
One evening in December, he opened his study window to let the cool wind in. It smelled almost like snow. Outside, the grass was patchily breaking through the less-than-an-inch that had melted mostly over the course of the day.
“Don’t know who’s in charge of things like this,” he said, laughing a bit at himself and feeling as if the wind might as well be blowing right through him, “But even if it’s not…normal? Realistic? I wish…I wish it could snow the way I remembered. I wish I could feel the way I felt then. I remember that, though I know I don’t remember everything. I don’t think…I don’t think I could help that. Not me or anyone. So…please.” His voice catches at the last word.
For a long time he waited in the almost-cold wind, his hands gripping the windowsill. He felt like he’d waited like this before, when he was less patient. “Please,” he said again, whispering around the lump in his throat. “I…believe…it could happen.”
Breathe in. Breathe out.
The wind turned icy so suddenly that Jamie’s next breath in was a cracked gasp, and his next breath out was lopsided laughter. He grinned, not knowing why, and leaned far out the window just to breathe more. Another gust pushed him back to safety, and he laughed again when he saw that it had brought a few snowflakes with it.
And then, at last, something like another gust (but not but what?) hit him, and he shivered from his head down to his feet, chilled, but happy with the kind of pure joy that used to make him run and jump for no reason at all, and oh, yes, it finally smelled like snow, like snow without salt and diesel, the snow that he remembered, better than he remembered.
Outside, the snow continued to fall in huge perfect flakes. The remnant of the day before was already almost covered. Jamie sighed, laughing, feeling more alive than he had in years. He didn’t know how. He didn’t know why. But it felt like a gift, a gift that had been waiting to be given.
He wrapped himself in a blanket and watched it snow all night, not minding that one of his arms and shoulders never managed to get warm. He even tilted his head toward that side, now and then, as if resting his head on that of someone leaning against him. It seemed like the right thing to do.
It was.