The blizzard

I'm pretty certain this word doesn't exist in English but, regardless, it sure is blizzarding out there.

A few minutes ago, the snow was dropping and blowing fiercely, like a rain of icicles. Now the flakes are fatter and flutter in the air, like dust balls floating in a ray of sunlight, stirred up by the lazy sweeping of a broom. There is no visible sun out there today, though, only the powder-sugared landscape that's being quickly swallowed by the snow.

The white does make colors stand out more brightly, though. The cardinal sparkles in his reddest of coats while the black-and-white junco's yellow beak seems to have a flame-like quality. The burly robin, whose orange chest contrasts fashionably with his dark-gray wings, has a black head that appears a velvet shade of blacker in the whiteness.

This harsh forbidding Arctic-ness is nothing like the warm February days I grew up with. Those were days of drought and sweat, days of a tropical sun that burns and sizzles and commands. The winter sun, when he's around, is mostly content with playing at shadows or sparkling faintly in the driven snow.

Still, although I'm far removed from those long-gone Caribbean days, this unremitting icy cover reminds me of the piragüas, the snow cones of my childhood, right before the piragüero shaved the block of ice a few times with his dark and calloused hands. He then poured his magically colored syrups, turning the small mountains of shaved ice in their flimsy paper cones into delicious, cool respites from the midday sun.

In these harsh winter lands, there are no piragüeros to create magic with their ice. In these harsh winter lands, the cardinals, the juncos, and the robins are the syrups that color the otherwise-utter icy whiteness of a blizzard day.