As I live in Florida, I rarely get to experience the thrill of the snow. When I was in kindergarten, my childhood best friend Katherine moved unexpectedly to Iowa, leaving the heat behind her and headed straight for a realwinter. After a few years of not seeing each other, my mom decided to make plans to fly up and surprise her at school with her parents. On the day I had been waiting on for months, we drove to the airport and ran through security, various restaurants, and through the halls to board our plane. Before I knew it we had landed in Iowa.

After the surprise we immediately wanted to go play in the snow. The deep, white silence of the snow was amazingly sedative and nothing like I had experienced anywhere in Florida. As I looked up to the snowfall and then back down to the ground, I was overwhelmed with the plethora of snowball ammunition. I reached down and grabbed the small handful that I could gather and chucked it at Katherine only to find out she was doing the same thing. “And still fluttered down the snow” as we made cliché snow angels and had snowball fight after snowball fight. We were out there for hours, almost immune to the cold as we were having too much fun to take the temperature into consideration. These are moments I will never let myself forget, surface at the very glance of one of those beautiful, pure snowflakes.