The Snow and the Fish

My sister said, I’ll send you an exercise to write something short, just three minutes, about nature. But she never did. So I wrote something short about nature for three minutes anyway, and I’m glad I did. Writing is great, short it good. Here it is:

---

–  “This snow, amazing how peaceful it makes us.”

– “Yes. All the colours go and we all calm down.”

– “It’s like… scuba-diving at night, when you only see what’s in the torch beam and hear the lull of the bubbles and your breathing. You get really calm. Once we were diving at night and on the bottom we found this fish in a big glass bottle, like the ones people use for making wine in, and the fish was bigger than the neck of the bottle and it couldn’t get out. It must have swum in there when it was young and eaten whatever floated in, and then suddenly was too big to squeeze out. A few of us gathered round the bottle and watched the fish for a while in our torchlights, we were just hanging a few feet above the bottom of the sea watching the fish…”

– “Hmm.”

– “… Ha! Maybe we’re all a bit like that fish!”

– “Hmm.”

–  “…”

– “It’s all about having less information I suppose. Look at this… Just snow and space and the winter trees. Lots of white and a few lines… and hardly anyone around, that helps too.”

– “I wonder what the fish made of it when we turned up with our torches in the middle of the night.”

– “He was probably pretty pissed off. Or thought the sun had come out at the wrong time and then gone away again. Like a backwards solar eclipse. Shortest day of his life!”

– “Haha, yes!”

– “It’s so beautiful when it’s just lines and branches and snow. I hope it lasts…”