Something was inside the chimney, and it wasn’t a squirrel.
That was what woke her up in the end. Squirrels in the chimney were a sound her hindbrain would remember until its dying day, and this just barely almost insignificantly nigh-undetectably wasn’t that.
Maybe it was a racoon, suggested her darkest thoughts as she crawled out of her bed and into her clothes. Or a bird. That’d be a pleasant surprise to have to drag out of a chimney in the middle of the night after the last real snowstorm of the season. That’d be just the bee’s knees.
So she put on her thickest work gloves and opened up the hearth and before she could look, or shout, or do anything at all there was a quick rattle-snap-crack of activity from above and a tiny ball of concentrated and very frightened cold, wet particles shot into her lap and began frantically crawling around her shoulders and hiding in her hair.
No fur.
No feathers.
Just snow.
“Ah, shit.”
The last storm of the season had left an orphan.
***
In theory, that first night was about emergency preparations. In practice, it was a learning experience. How quickly she could walk with the little flurry wrapped around her neck without jostling it; how safe it felt with her there; how safe SHE felt going numb from the chin down; whether or not it was okay to wear a scarf underneath it, and so on and on and on, a hundred thousand tedious vitally necessary facts she didn’t know she needed until she discovered them.
It was good she had them though because the only other thing she managed to get done was to make a little baby box from an empty orange crate, an old sleeping bag, and every icepack in the fridge, and by the time morning came it wasn’t sleeping in it. It had returned to her head – not her neck, blessed be her iron-fisted grip on the blankets – and had frosted her hair and haloed her with a tiny swamp of slush. The water was clear and pure and ice, ice, ice cold and she woke up when her pillow finally overflowed and trickled down her shirt.
That was the last lesson left over from the night before: the flurry didn’t mind it if she shrieked and jumped.
In the morning she called Joanie Boxwood in her summer home who told her yes, there would be no more snow this spring; she called Malcolm Crisp out by his observation post who told her no, flurries didn’t venture off on their own so small and couldn’t migrate without their parents; and she called Theresa Boch down at the weather station who told her that no they didn’t raise—and-release orphaned or abandoned weather effects and didn’t recommend she try that either but unrelatedly if she was interested Theresa had a few totally useless books on that lying around she’d been meaning to get rid of that she could leave at her house if she liked.
She thanked them all and actually meant it a little more than she’d expected.
The books were newer than she’d feared and less rigid than she’d worried and not as hippy-dippy as she hoped. Blizzards are fragile and threatened on the climatic scale, not the personal, it told her. They’re flexible enough to unlearn odd habits from unusual childhoods and survive in the wild, within reason. Don’t coddle them, but don’t starve them of affection – they grow up surrounded by thousands and thousands of siblings and enveloped within the greater stormscape of their kind. Give them a variety of moist and dry environments to move between freely and experiment with. Don’t over-parent them. Don’t try to do this with pets in the house, unless they’re very, very brave or senile.
And don’t get too attached, because this shouldn’t last forever.
***
One thing the books spent a lot of time on was engineering the house for comfort. Spring would be an uncertain time, but summer would be the greatest test. Get it outside while you can so it can stretch a little, but don’t forget to prepare for the hardships to come.
Luckily she’d done her insulation last fall. Perfect timing. But she bought a new air conditioner just in case, and then a second, sturdier one because it turned out the little flurry could fit inside it and was curious about all the little bits of metal and wire.
She covered all the electrical outlets after that and kept a close eye on her appliances. There’d been no permanent damage done to the thing and she never saw it express interest in anything that wasn’t producing cold when running, but she went by mom’s old rule: better safe than extremely sorry and possibly dead in a house fire.
The walks were less stressful. By the time she felt ready enough to leave the house it was firmly battened on to her, and even when it roved down the street she never felt its icy root leave her shoulder. It knew it wasn’t big enough to survive on its own as surely as she did.
That didn’t mean it was a little angel though. On that first trip it crawled into her gutters and refused to come out for twenty minutes before she could get out of her driveway; he neighbour’s cat hissed at it and it chased him up a tree in sheer excitement before she could blink twice; and it was so fascinated with every puddle in the road that it nearly iced her boots to the ground six times.
But what was most troublesome was something she didn’t even notice until a full week later, when she made a trip down to the store for groceries. She prepared for days to train it to (temporary) full independence; deliberately leaving it alone in different rooms of the house, placing its climate trays at the other end of the house from her; building up its independence as far as such a thing could be stretched. It seemed happy enough when she left and she hurried off on her errands so quickly that she didn’t realize anything was wrong until she was standing on her front step and feeling for which pocket her keys were in.
Spring, the birds had sung the whole walk there and back. Spring, spring has sprung, spring, spring.
But right around her house – and on every walk she’d taken with the little flurry – there’d been nothing but silence.
***
The problem went away on its own, regardless of how she felt about it (though she did damn well miss the chickadees). When the first heat waves start to roll in the flurry hid from doors and windows like a shy dog. She moved its bed and its trays down to the basement and added more pans of cool water, which it lapped at like a dog. Then July arrived and the sun came down like a hammer and even that wasn’t enough, but – mercy of mercies – the old freezer still worked, and so it was that the hardest months for the little blizzard to survive in were paradoxically the simplest for her to deal with. In the morning she tucked it into the freezer; she went about her day; and in the evening she brought it out to play in the darkened basement amidst the melting ice cubes she froze anew with it every afternoon. It made shapes with them on the floor, and it made shapes with them as they froze with it during the long hot days – ice cubes in only the most nominal sense. Some were pyramids, some were spirals, some were shapes she felt barely able to understand, let alone describe, let alone look up.
It wasn’t suffering, for her or it. And that was good enough, for that summer, just barely, just almost, just enough, at least until the days began to shorten and the air started to turn crisp overnight and she tried to shut the freezer lid and it couldn’t fit.
“Well, someone’s growing up,” she said, and it billowed out of its container and whisked around her and the basement six times in enthusiasm.
***
The books said that was a little small, but for a freezer-raised flurry that had lived through a hot summer too far south she’d take a little small over just about anything else. And ‘a little small’ was profoundly relative and constantly changing; it was a little small when it couldn’t fit in the freezer in September; and a little small when it had to squish itself down to a howling blast to fit down the basement stairwell in October; and a little small when it couldn’t help but fill any room in the house to overflowing by November.
She prepared for it, for all of it. She covered the furniture, she wore her jacket indoors, she didn’t shy from it, she didn’t encourage it. It was big enough to hurt now, to bite at her fingers and nip at her toes and turn her cheeks red-then-pale. It was big enough to spend time outdoors again; then big enough to spend time outdoors for a little while unattended; then big enough that by the dawn of December it spent almost all day outside, peeking through the windows when it wanted to check on her or beg her for ice cubes or curl a little piece of itself next to the freezer and flap at the loose rubber lip of its lid’s seal.
The first real snowstorms arrived soon after.
***
She left a window or two open the first time; let it watch from indoors and tentatively waft a little gust or two of itself outside, flinching at the touch of strange snowflakes and icy winds that weren’t its own.
The second time she left the front door open and it eddied in and out of the house, growing and learning and warily jostling for space, learning to grow and assert and bluster.
The third time she shut it outdoors for the day, and all the rest of the month into January and through February oh how it played and roiled every time the sky clotted with fresh cold. Sometimes she’d sit outside with a hot drink and watch it cavort with its kin and wonder just how it was that she still could tell it apart so instantly.
She called Joanie Boxwood every other day.
No, not this time. No, not this one. No, there’ll be another. No. No. No, stop fussing. No and leave me alone. No. No. No. Hell no. No. No.
Yes, that’s it. That’s the last big one.
So in early march when the walls shook with the wail of the wind and the sky was furrowed white from horizon to horizon and you couldn’t even see that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face she let it sleep in her hair one last time (hard not to; it filled the house entire by now) and left the freezer lid open for it and put out ice cubes everywhere and opened the door and ushered it out to play and closed it behind it and shut it and didn’t open it again. Not that evening, not next morning.
***
It circled her house slowly; three revolutions in three days, filling the driveway and caking the windows past eye-height, howling and whining at the door like it hadn’t since it was a newborn. But when the fourth day came and with it the warm sunlight, it backed up into the sky, tucked its gales away inside itself, and drifted north with the rest of the clouds – gradually, oh so reluctantly, oh so achingly, but inevitably.
It wasn’t a little small anymore – you couldn’t tell it apart from any of the other blizzards.
Generally.
She could.
And that was why she still cried a bit over the sink afterwards. Not giving it a name could only do so much.