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Winter changed the countenance of a landscape, particularly in the Northeast, like, say, New York (the state, not the city). Even if it wasn't snowing, the trees possessing leaves all withered up, shriveled like a dead limb, hibernating for next spring to bring their colors out once again and removing the thick canopies that shaded the ground during the day. The pine trees, on the other hand, remained resolute, still, annoyingly prickly, as pine trees tended to do. And, of course, on days when it snowed, everything would be covered up in a thick blanket of choking, smothering white, decimating the population of grasses and flowers still living beneath its amorphous body, absorbed into the snow like it were an extraterrestrial invader.
The second most landscape-changing thing about the wintertime was how it completely rewrote the rules of water. No fish could survive in a river that had frozen over completely from bottom to top, providing ample ground for the deer and foxes to trample over in their attempt to find new lands but proving much too cold for anything to linger for very long. The river flowing through and beneath Lalonde Manor was no different from any other in that regard, even when it terminated in a waterfall - in frigid temperatures like this, even the waterfall froze over, turned into a sheet of pure, crystalline icicles, threatening to fall down and shatter with the lightest breeze.
Rose Lalonde, bundled up in all her winter finery, adored weather like this. Desolate, quiet, soft and firm at the same time. The snow lying on the ground during the week of snowfall had compressed itself into a thick, glacier-like layer, crushing the dirt beneath it, only occasionally made worse by the addition of new powdery snow using its accumulated ounces to crush more snow beneath it. It firmed up, like the world's coldest layer cake, turning into thick chunks of clear, perhaps vaguely blue-ish ice, easily walkable, even without snowshoes. Rose's boots only rarely broke through the solidified surface, leaving a trail of imprecise footsteps printed into the snow, thin outlines of the boot's sole and then, perhaps every fifth or sixth step, a hole where her foot broke through.
There was not much greater purpose here for her snowbound adventure, although she did bring a backpack full of stuff, including a book to read. Her mother was not home, and she wished to step on the river, which had frozen completely through, despite the possible risks to her safety. And you know what? That was fine, it was going to happen, and she was going to have a good time of it. Her foot met the feet's worth of ice and scraped snow off the river's solid surface, looking down to see the dirt and stone at the bottom of the river with crystal clarity, like she had been really seeing it for the first time. She narrowed her eyes and, for a moment, could swear she saw a frozen crustacean of some kind. But maybe it was just a strangely shaped rock. Who knew?
Rose pulled out a thick tarp of material from her backpack and laid it down on the river's surface so that she would not get wet, and then, a nice, woolen blanket for her to sit on. Because when else in your life would you have the opportunity to say "Yes, I read a book while sitting on top of a completely frozen river, what of it?"? Never, in Rose's eyes. Or, well, probably next winter, but the oncoming encroachment of the Earth's warming may make that a more tenuous proposition than she initially imagined. So, it was today or never, sitting down on her frozen throne and pulling out her book and reclining slightly onto her backpack, which carried with it also a lunch and a dinner in two separate lunchboxes.
In the corner of her eye, she saw a fox peering at her out from behind a bush. She turned her head to face it, and it vanished into the snow. Shrugging her shoulders, she began leafing through the pages of her book with her gloved fingers, watching her own breath condense into clouds in front of her.