It Feels Like

Author : Iva Koevska

-Mommy, what does snow feel like?

I’m in the kitchen taking care of the dishes after dinner. I turn around and there she is. My little daughter’s staring at some snowflake hologram. It’s as big as her head, a gorgeous illusion of perfect symmetry. One you will hardly ever find. Since it doesn’t rain or snow anymore.

-Honey…

I’m delivering this climate speech for the hundredth time, trying to explain to someone who knows only sun, bright blue sky and a daily temperature of 22?C what does wind or raindrops or snowflakes or dew feel like. I hate those climate history classes and I know that kids need to know. It’s just that… I haven’t felt the slightest change of weather for some 20 years now. And the last time I saw and felt snow was right before the Great Installment. Right before they put this great big computer controlled factory dome up there in the sky to take care of the weather, the global warming and all the pollution. It’s like having an air conditioner switched on all the time in some weird incubator.

So now I’m trying to make up my mind and remember what snow was like. I must have been 10 years old back then. As old as my little darling.

-You know ice, don’t you? It’s wet and cold. Well, snow feels kind of like ice.

I’m lying. Like I lied when I told her that morning dew felt just wet. There was more to that. We hated and we loved the change in weather back in the old days. Back then we were not the prisoners of an artificial sky designed to “bring you comfort and safe environment for your children”. We were not supposed to experience rain and snow and dew through holograms. We lived through every gift or punishment nature had for us.

Oh, I know what snow felt like. What it was like to dance in the perfect whiteness of winter, making angels in the snow. What it was like to have a snowflake melt on your tongue, to take a handful of these perfectly shaped jewel flakes and imprison them in an ice sphere marked with the warmth of your hands. What it was like to fall in love with the chill of the clear winter sky…

It felt like freedom and childhood and love.

But how do you tell that to someone who’ll never know more than sun?