I revel in winter from behind the safety of the sliding glass door that separates our backyard from the living room, shivering at its icy cold against my fingertips. Although Pringles, our springer spaniel, has done his best to trample it down, the snow remains all the same: resilient, a crystalline white blanket fallen ever-so-gently to cover the world. The thought brings a slight smile to my lips, and I clutch closer my mug of chamomile tea, blowing into its surface to better warm my face with its steam, warding off winter’s chill. Nonetheless, I gleefully embrace the simple prettiness of the season. But when Pringles trots up to the glass and ends my reverie, even so, I cannot resist his liquid eyes, beseeching me to join him for a bit of winter fun, a carefree romp in the snow.

“Mommy, I’m going outside to play with Pringles, okay?” I call back over my shoulder into the kitchen. A good girl, I always ask permission. “That’s fine!” comes the reply.

Eagerly, I pull my snow pants on over my jeans, put on coat, mittens, hat, scarf, boots, and, grabbing the door’s handle, thrust all my weight against it and slide it open, the resulting, miniature gust of wind bringing a flush to my cheeks. I step outside, delighting in the delicate crunching sound my boots make against the snow, and in the frozen cloud of air that is my breath. Pringles, however, has no patience for my daydreaming. He takes off at a run – head thrust forward, ears flying, feet kicking up snow – and I am happy to follow him, although I am no match for his speed. Our feet pound the snow as we fly around the garden, making deep paths around the swing set, and I am filled with the sheer ecstasy of the moment, of the breathless chase that lacked any hope of reward from its start, and therefore carries with it no requirements. Finally, though, I abandon the chase in favor of spinning, simply because I can, and my feet tread a small circle into the snow before I collapse dizzily, marveling at the world tipping haphazardly to and fro. As the earth’s surface reaches its original equilibrium, I notice the sounds of the winter breezes, bustling merrily through the needles of the tall pines, making tiny whistles, and feel the pinprick tingles of the surrounding snowflakes melting against my cheeks. Flooded with happiness and smiling giddily, it then occurs to me what can complete the moment’s perfection. I remember the rose.

My mind is instantly flooded with thoughts: I had first discovered the rose one day in November, as all the other roses on our tiny stunted bush were just beginning to die; yet there it grew, a new green bud not even starting to unfurl. I had been both delighted and intensely curious. As cold began to set in, its fellows had long since wilted and been pruned away, and still it remained, alone, swelling slowly within its green chamber…until one day in early December it burst, finally, and without fanfare, save from me, modestly revealing only elegant slivers of delicately veined white, which peeked shyly through the sepals. After that I ventured outside several times a week to check my rose’s progress, watching eagerly as the pouting white lips stretched away from the green. Even with the coming of the frost, and then the snow, which created a fluffy white crown on my flower’s head, I did not cut it from the bush, determined that this story would play out until the end.

In the course of an instant my mind is flooded with these recollections, making the perfect vision of my winter rose all the more irresistible. With a small “oof” of purposefulness, I heave myself up from my incomplete snow angel to hurry to the flowerbeds, smiling blindly as hopes of what I will discover whirl through my mind.

What I see makes the breath catch in my throat. The rose, my rose, has lost its pure, virtuous white color, the color that gave it so much meaning, that provided that beautifully symbolic white-on-white, life-on-death metaphor. It is brown. True, the flower’s center has yet to submit completely to the frost, but the cold has wilted the petals, turning them almost entirely mottled and dull – altogether devoid of life. I struggle to hold in a sob. The yard seems encompassed by a deadening silence, and I can feel time slowing around me as my loss seeps in like a poison. Whisperings fill the air – another breeze – not cheerful, but instead lonely and weak. All my hopes, my dreams, and above all my belief in miracles have been extinguished, as suddenly and efficiently as fingers snuffing out a candle’s flame, a blow I haven’t the strength to combat. I am devastated. I am inconsolable – I could have saved this rose many times, but I did not. It had been a beautiful idea, so perfect, so deadly in its impossibility. Stubbornly I had refused to salvage this last remaining representative of summer, even though I had known, in the deepest, most painfully honest depths of my heart, that I was asking too much.

Going back inside, it is impossible to hide my misery, and equally impossible to expect that it will go unnoticed.

“What’s wrong?” my mom asks, her voice sympathetic. I give her no answer. The only thing that occupies my thoughts is my failure, a constant echoing reminder of what my expectations have done. The rose is dead, the rose is dead, my rose is dead.