Daniel's Sister: A Winter's Morning Walk

One Sunday morning the sun penetrated every particle of snow laying on the ground. This was the first Sunday of the new year, and I wanted to be outside to experience the magical bliss of a lazy weekend morning with a special friend, my brother Daniel.

Before we left, I made sure my brother had worn enough clothes to bare the chilled walk.

“Here...wear this,” I said, handing him my gloves. “And this,” I added, and placed my tinted glasses in his hands. I also had thought about what to wear. It didn’t take me long to decide on mother’s tall puffer coat that didn’t have the traditional hood but enough fabric around the neckline to roll it up and over my head.

Out through our building’s back entrance and across the street we found ourselves on an empty snow-filled sidewalk. Our other walks, mostly during the Fall, would pique my brother’s interest in collecting fallen leaves on the ground. He bent down many a times every few feet to pick up an isolated leaf, without me prompting him. This happened so often to the point where I finally brought a plastic bag and asked Daniel to place all of the leaves in it.

I didn’t bring a bag for this walk, which felt refreshing as I didn’t want to worry about Daniel’s hands getting dirty or wet.

I observed my brother take joy playing in the snow. His hands swish and gliding through the untouched white. I noticed but said nothing. From then on, I began capturing Daniel’s moments on my phone as visual evidence.

At the entrance to Soundview Park on Morrison Avenue, I stopped walking and began writing letters in the snow hoping that Daniel would follow suit. He didn’t. “Look. Here’s Ariam,” I said. Daniel looked at the ground and took the branch that I was pointing to. I grew excited at the thought of what was to come from this gross motor exercise. Daniel’s hand went up and back down and around in a circular motion. Could it have been a D letter turned into the C letter starting shape? Either way, I enjoyed revisiting an old tried and true technique that I used as an ESL working with my kindergarten-aged students in Taiwan.  

I’m happy I spent the morning outside with Daniel. I sometimes feel icky about not spending enough time with him even though I probably shouldn’t. I’m just being hard on myself. Another treat on the walk involved a playground elliptical--Daniel surprised me with the tenacity to get a leg of the elliptical out from the snow. He swung it back and forth on his left leg.

Although there was no licking of snowflakes, we fell on our bottoms twice and that was enough fun for me to have in the cold all week.