On Christmas morning when I was five, I woke up and found everything outside was covered in white snow. It wasn’t the first snow, but it was the first time the snow had stayed on the ground that winter. From the balcony of our tiny half-dilapidated apartment, I saw the white snow shining bright everywhere – on the trees, on the ground, on the cars, and on the apartment blocks where my friends lived in.
After the breakfast, my mother suggested that we should all go out to the playground to enjoy the snow. My little brother and I cheered with excitement. Since my father was still sleeping, it was the plan between the three of us.
We all wore warm jackets and head warms before going out. I remember wearing a new pale blue jacket with a fluffy hood. It wasn’t the jacket I usually wore, but my mother chose it for me that morning, and its colour was a perfect match to the white world outside.
Once on the playground, my brother and I started running in the snow. Nobody had yet walked on the ground that morning, and there was not even a single footprint before us.
“Hurray!” we screamed as we ran.
My mother had brought her heavy black Nikon camera to take photos of us in the snow. As we ran around in the park, she called us to stop for a photo shoot. My brother and I had no interest in such a thing, but my mother insisted, so we stopped and made a few different poses in the snow. When she was satisfied, we went back to our running and screaming.
After some time, my mother called us to go home.
“So soon?”
My brother and I protested as we ran back to join my mother at the playground entrance. The three of us walked back home, and the memory of that morning stayed with me close.