My first lifetime, in 4 seasons: Winter

I'm swaddled in winter wear.  Over-bundled unto immobility.  Winter after Christmas is a much more serious affair than before.  The sky is much too close to darkness for me to only now feel as if dinner should be soon.  I think I should smell something, but its too cold for a window or door to be cracked.  I'm in my front yard close enough to the house to tell, but the scent of salty mucus in the scarf drawn tight across the lower half of my face would block it anyhow.  My playmates have gone home for dinner and my sister has gone as well, leaving me alone.  The front porch light sconces are out, twin dusted bulbs alone like light house keepers, wrapped in a few filaments of spent spider threads, cold-cracked with a parcel of moth husks to mark time.  The sun was a small, glowing egg yolk sliding behind the tree line at the end of our cul-de-sac, dragging its watery orange silk with it, leaving me very alone in the snow brightened front lawn.  My eyes picked out the shapes our daytime trees, rendered now in an indigo palette, the ones like our christmas getting snagged and tugged out of form by the same jangly wind that was pulling water out of my eyes.  Not afraid, really, but more out of instinct i ran towards the two yellow beacons that were the prismatic windows of our front door.  Taking a straight line across the lawn, i could hear the pop of each step as i broke through the crusted snow over my own snotted breathing.  Perhaps the awkward snowsuit, or just the unpracticed gait of a five-year-old was to blame, but i lost my footing and went down in a heap.  A different pop, underneath the tumult of my collapse, was clearly audible.  In children my age, the doctor would later say, they're called greenstick fractures.  Because children's bones splinter like a honeysuckle twig.  It ached.  Funny-like.  I didn't cry out.  I rolled over on my back, my little greenstick held across my chest, breathing to myself.  Fast at first and then slower.  And slower, still.  And then only quietly, my mouth tasting of saliva, but warmer, like batteries.  The sky, darker now, was cold-washed with clouds, framed by the hood of my snowsuit, the few stars shattered by the water filling my eyes.  I blinked them dry and listened to the trees, just out of sight.