this ribbon-tied moment

a parcel left on the doorstep of the morning, wreathed with ribbons, waiting to be unwrapped

I woke to subdued silence and strange clarity of light. ‘It snowed overnight’ my husband told me, sitting up beside me in bed, as we heard the thunder of teen feet on the stairs, and a shout of ‘snow!’ From my little window at the top of the house I could see the smothered rooftops of the town, hills beyond enveloped in a cold cloud of fog. I padded down in my slippers to make breakfast, and asked my sixteen-year-old if he would walk up the hill with me, relieved to find him not too old for the joy of a snow day.

We pulled on boots and coats and carefully climbed the stepped track that wound to the top. The valley had vanished into fog with nothing visible on the hilltop but a clump of snow-heavy trees and a trail of deep, sunken footsteps leading to the edge. Around the trees and up through a stile we went, to the field above the woods. I stood for a moment beneath a hazel, watching figures emerge from the fog along the footpath until the boy, throwing a snowball up into the branches, caused a small avalanche above my head. I squealed as the cold hit my neck and, laughing, we began the scramble down.

‘Take my hand, Mum’—my son stretched out a strong arm as I slipped. We were alone in the hushed woods, the boughs of every tree feathered with ice-crystal white, fog trailing along the path ahead of us. I looked up at him in his bobble hat, my leap-year baby grown tall, so calm and kind. ‘Do you remember the other snow days?’ I asked him, thinking of those white ribbon-wrapped days that are scattered through his childhood and stretch back even into my own. As a girl I walked to the next village with my Dad and brother for sledging in the quarry, skidding down sideways on plastic sacks. Snow days always were days out of time, my memories of them pure and crystalline as snowflakes.

Some moments—a quiet walk in the snow with my boy who is growing up and away so fast I can hardly breathe—feel like unexpected gifts. They arrive as a parcel left on the doorstep of the morning, wreathed with ribbons, waiting to be unwrapped. What if this leap year’s extra day wasn’t the 29th February—what if our gift day will come to each of us when we least expect it, unlooked for and ribbon-tied, time spent with someone we love, or in a place we feel peace? What will you do with that moment—will you collect it, keep it in your breast pocket, press it between the pages of a book?

In the loft, looking for something else entirely, I found one of the volumes of my teenage diary, my name hand-painted on the front in large pink letters under a picture of a girl with swirling flowers for hair, and a silver unicorn. Inside the cover I had copied, with careful curlicues, a line from a song I was obsessed with at the time:

I’d like to freeze that moment in time and wrap it up in tinfoil, with little ribbons and tinsel, and say: ‘that was a happy day.’

I am no longer that girl—intense and watchful, writing a daily missive with a scratchy blue biro—but I remain a magpie for moments. I catch them still, wrapping not with tinfoil but with words. Time—which cannot be frozen, however much I might wish it—flows relentlessly on. Perhaps though, during this leap year, a single bright day could be fished from the current: a perfect moment wrapped in ribbons, to be kept forever close.

Thank you for reading,

Laura x

my book

my instagram