winter scene writing prompt for the 500 Club

It's not exactly 500 words, but I've been up since 4 a.m. and I'm completely jet-lagged, so I'm cutting myself some slack. I have been reading headlines of weird news stories today to get ideas for stories. Then I remembered my friend Amy's site: The Parking Lot Confessional, and the challenge to write to prompts.

So, I checked out the prompts for this week and went for it.

This week's prompt (the one I chose): Describe a winter scene without using the words winter, cold, snow, ice or frozen.

It took me fifteen minutes just to bundle up. We hadn't had a storm like this since eighth grade. I braced myself and opened the front door. It was a good quarter mile to the mailbox. Why couldn't we have a mailbox at the end of our walkway like normal families did? Or better yet, one of those convenient slots in our garage door? No, we had to live in "the country". We were one notch above having an outhouse in the backyard.

Crap. I could see the top branches of the pines bending. This was going to suck. I started down the porch steps, holding onto the rail so I wouldn't slip. Trudging down the path took every bit of my energy and I could already feel my socks getting wet inside my boots. This had better be worth it. The wind was slapping at my face and pulling hair out from under my hat and swirling it around in front of my face, making it hard to see. It bit through my gloves, threatening to turn me back around the way I came. Squinting to keep the chilled air from drying out my eyes, I wished I'd worn my ski goggles. Finally, I reached the mailbox. I stood there for a minute, staring it down, half expecting it to laugh at me for coming all this way for nothing. Who was I kidding, anyway? No one in my family had ever gone to college. I held my breath and opened the little arched door. I fumbled three pieces of mail with numb fingers. A bill for Mom from Target, a plea for funding from the Democratic National Committee, surely signed personally by the President, and the letter. It was here. All I had to do now was open it.