The season she almost missed

Maya hated winters…until one day….

Maya had built her life as a meticulous argument against winter. She’d traded the brittle, grey skies of her childhood for the perpetual, gentle green of a coastal botanist’s life. Her world was a calibrated symphony of humidifiers, grow-lights, and the lush, breathing silence of her greenhouse, where orchids and ferns knew no frost. She spoke to her plants, not to the memory of icy winds that used to rattle the old farmhouse windows.

Her grandmother, Ida, was the last stubborn tenant of that farmhouse, a wilting sunflower at the edge of the northern plains. Her weekly calls were a familiar melody. “The geese are staging a riot on the pond,” Ida would say, or, “The maple out back is showing its bones again.” Maya would respond with descriptions of blooming jasmine, the salt-tinged air, deftly steering them both away from the coming subject of winter.

But this year, the melody changed. Ida’s voice, usually as firm as seasoned timber, developed a thin crack. “It’s going to be a long one, Maya-bird. The woolly bears are all black.” A pause, heavier than the snow she described. “I could use a hand with the storm windows.”

The request was a stone in Maya’s perfectly balanced pond. To go back was to admit winter existed. Yet, the tremor in her grandmother’s voice was a vine she could not prune. She booked a flight for a single weekend, a surgical strike of familial duty. She packed a suitcase full of sweaters she hated.

The land welcomed her with a slap. The sky was a vast, pale bowl, the air so cold it felt clean in a surgical, shocking way. The farmhouse stood sentinel against the endless white and brown fields, smoke unspooling from its chimney. Ida hugged her tightly, smelling of wool, woodsmoke, and ginger. “You’re just in time,” she said, her eyes crinkling. “He’s here about the furnace.”

He was Sam, Ida’s neighbor from the next section over. He was in the cellar, a figure emerged from the very earth of the place. He was tall and steady, dressed in flannel and quiet competence, his hands assessing the ancient furnace with a practical reverence. He looked up as Maya descended, and his eyes were the colour of the pine trees that bordered the property—a deep, enduring green you only saw in permanent landscapes.

“Your granddaughter?” he asked Ida, a hint of surprise in his warm voice.

“The one who thinks winter is a personal insult,” Ida chuckled, leaving them to fetch tea.

Maya crossed her arms, defensive. “It’s inefficient. A period of death and waiting.”

Sam wiped a smudge of grease from his cheek, leaving another. “Or dormancy. A rest. The land needs to dream.” He tapped the furnace gently. “This old gal needs a new motor. I’ll have to go into town for the part. You want to ride along? Your grandma says you’ve been in the city too long.”

The drive was a silent lesson in the geometry of winter. Sam’s old truck rattled down gravel roads etched between oceans of snow. He pointed out things she’d spent a lifetime un-seeing: the delicate tracery of a frozen creek, the blush of red willow against the white, the way a hawk hung motionless in the crystalline air. He spoke of the land not as something dormant, but as something alive in a different, slower language.

“See that field?” he said, nodding toward a blank expanse. “Buried under there, the prairie clover is sleeping. Its roots are forty feet deep, just waiting. It’s not avoiding winter. It’s using it.”

The words found a crack in her resolve. In town, while he got the part, she wandered. She saw her reflection in a frost-whorled window—a pale, tense woman among barrels of hardy cabbages and bins of thick socks. She bought two pairs of shearling-lined gloves, one for Ida, one for herself.

Back at the farmhouse, Sam installed the motor. Maya, on impulse, brought him a mug of tea. Their fingers brushed, and his were warm, rough from work. A simple, electric contact. He thanked her, his pine-green eyes holding hers for a moment too long before he turned back to his task.

That evening, after Sam left with a promise to check in, a different silence settled. Ida didn’t talk of storms, but of her own youth, of skating on the pond under a full moon, of the profound quiet of a snowbound morning. “You can hear your own heart out there,” she said. “It’s a good sound.”

The next morning, Maya awoke to a world transformed. A soft, immense snow was falling, thick and steady, already smoothing all the world’s sharp edges. The forecast on the radio spoke of a road-closing blizzard. Her surgical strike was foiled. Panic, her old companion, fluttered in her throat.

She found Ida sitting by the kitchen window, perfectly content. Sam arrived just as the wind began to howl, on an ancient snowmobile, to ensure they had enough firewood inside. “Roads are closed,” he said, stamping snow from his boots in the porch. “You’re in for the duration.”

The three of them spent the day in a cocoon of woodsmoke and lamplight. Sam stayed, not out of necessity, but because it felt right. He and Maya played cribbage at the old table while Ida dozed in her armchair. They talked of small, solid things: the best apple varieties for pie, the pattern of animal tracks, the way the light changed on the snow.

When night fell, true and deep, Ida went to bed early. Maya and Sam stood at the storm window she’d come to fix, watching the blizzard rage. The world was a furious, white void.

“It’s terrifying,” Maya whispered, finally admitting it.

“It is,” Sam agreed, his shoulder a solid inch from hers. “But watch.” He pointed to the old maple, a skeletal giant in the yard. “See how it doesn’t fight? It bends. It lets the snow gather on its branches, and that weight protects its roots. Come morning, it’ll be standing, dressed in white, more beautiful for having endured.”

He turned to her. In the reflection of the glass, she saw not the woman who had run from the cold, but someone who might, perhaps, be capable of standing within it. His hand found hers, the one clad in the new shearling glove. His touch was not a demand, but an offer. A shared warmth.

The blizzard shook the house, but for the first time, Maya did not hear a threat. She heard a lullaby. She heard the land dreaming. And in the quiet space between the gusts, with Sam’s hand in hers and her grandmother sleeping soundly upstairs, she heard something else, too—the steady, promising beat of her own heart, no longer running, but finally coming home.

Total:950 words
Prompt:Avoiding Winter. Required Genre:Nature
Entry for:"The Writer's Cramp"  February 1, 2026