After a snow storm on the prairie, just the ordinary ones where you go to bed and in the night it falls, the day is gray the next morning, the prairie is still. Cold. The most silent it ever gets. No wind, not even a whisper of it in the trees.

The grass lies slanted through the snow and the clouds are all rumpled over the horizon. The plowed field covered in snow, but you can see the dirt brown ridges in the soil poking through. The hills lie gray, running black with streams of trees. And there's a little yellow house just across the way, surrounded by pines. The ground matches the sky and everything is this blue gray color that can only be found on a winter day.

I sit down in the snow and long prairie grass, my feet tucked up under me, and just look and listen to the silence of it all.

When you can just sit and hear nothing but your breathing and watch a prairie under snow and feel the silence, you wonder how you could have missed living in such a place, and why hadn't I noticed sooner? How beautiful life can be when you just sit and listen to it breathing inside you. It makes you never want to leave, you can never get enough of it.

I hear their voices down the hill, my siblings traipsing up with the sleds, wondering where I am. I smile 'cause I'm there ahead of them. Their voices sound so hollow, but so near in the silence, with no wind to wisp them away. Some days it's good to look out through your own eyes, you can see so much more that way.

Love,  Kayla