Descriptive Paragraph -- Winter

Skating

There was the complete greyness of it all. This wasn't a dismal, gloomy grey, but a total, all-encompassing, expectant grey. This was the grey of the clouds in all their fullness, stretching across the sky as far as we could see, and the reflection of that grey in the ice on which we stood. Between the ice and sky were bare oak trees, their trunks a darker hue of grey, but grey nonetheless. It was as if the world were now a blank grey canvas, waiting for the snow to color it. And the snow was coming. We hadn't been told as much, but we could sense it. There was the taste of impending snow in the air. I would remove my scarf from my mouth, feel the cold air against the moisture on my lips, and breathe in deeply. Like ice water on a summer's day, I could feel the air as it poured down my throat and gathered in my lungs. It was fresh and clean and tasted of snow. More penetrating than the taste of the air, however, were the sounds surrounding us; rather, the lack of sounds. There was a heaviness to the air--if you stood still, and tried to breathe as quietly as possible, then the sound of the silence could be overpowering. The world around us--the wind, the animals, the ice--was holding its breath, waiting for the sky to break. And the snow was coming. Then a car horn honked, and we saw Lisa's mother waving us in. We began to skate back, alternating between racing and gliding, our feet and shins vibrating as our skates ran across the pocky ice. We jumped over the holes left by the fishermen. "Look! A dead fish!" We stopped. "Cool." The fish was frozen atop an abandoned hole, and like the sky, and the ice, and the trees, completed the grey landscape. Finally, we sat in the car, where the warm air made our frozen cheeks burn, and drove away. "Look kids!" said Lisa's mother, "It's starting to snow! Look at it come down!" We acted surprised, but we had known all along.

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