Melting: Honorable Mention, Essay Memoir
The final honorable mention chosen for our Essay Memoir category is a story written by Mae Fraser. In this piece, they shares their thoughts on the lack of snow, how unstable heat waves infiltrate our weather patterns, and how "the world will be desolate" as a result.
By Mae Fraser
Winters are getting warmer. I see it in every drip, drip, drop of the melting snow that came much later this year in the form of a measly one-inch blanket. It used to swaddle everything in its freezing embrace, chilling us down to our very bones, rattling for some semblance of warmth. Now, it is gone as soon as it has come, whisked way into groundwater beneath us. Some of us pray for warmth, but still want to hold our winters close.
As the globe begins to warm more and more, we risk our snowmen soldiers and our natural ice rinks made from frozen lakes. I say I’m grateful for when the snow begins to melt earlier and earlier each year because even the sight of snow barricades me inside, but really, I am screaming for the world to freeze again, the coming of a new ice age. Anything to keep us stuck in time before it becomes too warm to ever get cold again. I may hate the cold, but I never want it to leave, to become a figment of my imagination. A shudder of the past.
February should not be reaching 50 degrees only a week into the month, or 60 in two. It shouldn’t be halfway through December before we get our first half inch of snow. I shouldn’t be wearing tank tops in the middle of the winter because it’s warm enough to be spring. Where did the winters of four Nor’easters go? They shouldn’t be missing or devolved into a historical statistic. The world is becoming a historical statistic. Warm, warmer, getting ever so warmer, breaking new records that should never have been broken. We should be doing more to stomp this curve before it’s irreversible. Or maybe we’re at that point. Maybe we should’ve done more even sooner.
I watch the melting drops of the love child of a bombogenesis and ice storm that crashed upon the world just days, weeks ago. It freezes us in place; global warming won’t let us go unthawed. It will get warmer, warmer, warmer, until life is no longer sustainable. Winters will become snowless mysteries, and our world will crumble under the heat of the greenhouse our atmosphere is quickly metamorphosizing into. We’re getting warmer, unable to cool. And like a sweltering summer day, we become an oven, burning instead of nurturing. The globe is warming, despite what some want to believe, and soon your wishes of all warm days will come true. You’ll have 60, 70-degree days in February. Oh! Oh wait! That is already happening. Soon enough, the world will be desolate, scorched by a thousand suns. We will all be wishing for snow, but it will never come again.
I hate snow, but I never want to see it go. I was born to snow and ice, and with the climate changing, my genesis will soon fade away.
Edited by Samantha Flaherty