OC Blog

Winters of Change

Winter, the year’s final breath, arrives with its shortest days, but for a child, it never means a shortage of joy—especially when the world is wrapped in a soft, white blanket of snow. I remember the wonder that filled me, like a snowflake fluttering in my chest, as the first flurries began to fall. The air would echo with children's laughter ringing like bells across the yards, and we would rush out, feet pounding against the earth, to greet winter’s magic.

After a night of snowfall, our excitement was boundless. At dawn, we’d leap out of bed like jack-in-the-boxes, fling open the door, and race to the nearby park, our steps crunching through the snow, each one a crisp crunch, crunch in the quiet morning. Building snowmen with cold, powdery snow that seemed to whisper under our touch, we’d mold each flake like a tiny miracle. Snowball fights burst forth, laughter blending with the soft thud of snowballs hitting coats, and I can still feel the icy fingers of a snowball slipping down my neck like a winter ghost.

For the adults, snow was less a playground and more a task. The rhythmic scrape of shovels—shrrk, shrrk—was winter’s work song, breath puffing like steam engines in the cold. Their muttered curses mixed with weary smiles, a small battle won when the path was cleared, a victory over winter’s relentless grip.

As I grew up and moved to the city, snow became a different kind of adversary—traffic jams like tangled knots, trains creeping along icy tracks like sluggish serpents, and commutes that seemed to stretch on endlessly, as if time itself were caught in the freeze. The shared dance of shoveling snow was replaced by snowplows and salt trucks, metallic beasts that roared down the streets, trading the warmth of community for the cold hum of machines.

Today, snowfalls are becoming rarer, like a story fading from the pages of a cherished book, erased by the hand of climate change. Decades ago, the river would freeze solid, strong enough to hold an adult; years later, it barely supported a child. Now, it never freezes at all. Snowy days have turned into endless stretches of gray skies and rain, as if the heavens themselves were grieving the loss of winter’s wonders.

As snow becomes a fleeting memory, I realize its magic wasn’t just in the snowflakes but in the way it brought us together—in play, in work, in those simple, shared moments. Now, as I look at the gray skies and ceaseless rain, I’m reminded of the fragility of these joys. The changing climate has reshaped not just the landscape, but our very connection to it, making me hold onto those disappearing winters even tighter, like snowflakes in a child's hand, precious and melting away.

Disclaimer: The ideas and feelings in this essay come from a real person, but the language and expression are crafted by AI, ChatGPT, since the author is not a native speaker. We conducted an experiment to see whether such collaboration between human and machine can bring something new and meaningful to the world.