Welcome to Gaia! ::

^_^ YAY! I was accepted into the guild! Well, I saw this advertisement in someone siggy, I don't remember where, and I absolutely fell in love with the autumn mask because fall was always my very favorite season! I wrote this poem to show everything I see, feel, and hear on a beautiful autumn night!

I followed AnkhWL in here >.>

And here's my Entry:

Beaty of Winter

Winter holds great beauty, if you look for it.

The chill of the frigid morn as you wake, frost caked on your window in sparkling patterns that perhaps an artist's brush visited upon the glass during the night. You can touch it with your fingertips, bringing the taste of a crisp, dry breeze to your lips.

If you look outside you can see the ground covered in fresh snow, and if you listen carefully, you can hear it creaking and crackling in the dawning light. The trees are as lace, their branches icy fractals reaching into the white sky. Beams of sunlight bounce from the snow to the ice to your eyes, brighter than it should be, and you think you'd somehow burn from the intensity of it. The air you breathe is dry, crisp, and as you breathe out, sometimes it's as though you were a dragon in this icy empire, breathing out your little puffs of imaginary smoke.

If it snows again, there are the types of snowfall that make winter so delightful. Individual snowflakes, all separated out. You can see them in all their glory and uniqueness, each like a little star in the heavens. Then there is the clumpy, sticky snowfall, where the sky seems to just throw snow at you from the clouds. Some individual snowflakes will perservere, only to be wiped out by a great big chunk of snow sliding sorrowfully down someone's windshield. There are sometimes great flurries of snow, and when you see them, it could appear that the ground is heaving great amounts of snow at the sky, the wind allowing the flakes to dance and turn to and fro as though they have no care in the world.

Beauty can be found all over within the cold grasp of winter, you just have to see it. It's in the small points of the snowflake, the delicate trim of the trees by their icy prison, and that cold frosty pattern caked on the window every morning.

Skye's Entry

Amber, red, orange, gold,
Falling, dancing as the season unfolds.
Wind sweeping upwards, twirling, whirling.
Crunch. Crinkle. Crunch.

Sapphire, black, diamond, white,
Stars shine bright in an endless night.
Breath forming clouds, huffing, puffing.
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

Emerald, pink, yellow, gold,
Color returning as petals unfold.
Rain falling steady, dripping, dropping.
Splish. Splash. Splish.

Every color and every gem, coming together as one.
Heat returning, light now warming under the summer sun.
Pausing late at night to think back...
Crinkle. Crunch. Splash.

*loves on Ende* <33

*snuggles all* <3

Question~ An entry is good If all the actual text fits on a single page (size 12 Times New Roman, single spaced, one inch margins, etc.), correct? Meaning, if I format it so certain words are a bigger size or have their own line and it ends up pushing the prose over one page it's still okay?

And khryssie___x referred me <3

Growing up in the Sacramento Valley of California means the chances of having any sort of weather associated with winter is narrowed down to maybe-cold and you-get-some-rain. Some years it's you-get-lots-of-rain-and-a-smattering-of-hail. One must travel up lots of steep mountains to find the snow, and in my childhood I had some occasion to visit these places with my grandparents. This does not mean that I remember much about these times except what photographs can hold.

And yet, year after year, I wished for the snow. It was always that kind of wish that burns in your heart and makes your muscles sore through the sheer effort that goes into it. Sometimes I would be rewarded with a small flurry in the night that yielded barely enough snow in the grass the next morning, capable of creating one dirty little snow man. It was a meager and heartfelt offering from the weather in my silly valley, and I was always grateful.

Still, I wished for proper snowfall, starting from hopes for a white Christmas as a child, to snow for my birthday as a teenager, and then just maybe something in February that would break up the monotony when I became an adult.

I started community college, for lack of anything better to do. I joined art classes mostly, and had no friends. My shyness kept me away from the cafeteria and took my feet down the side gravel paths and around the fields. A nature preserve is a fine place for a college; the scenery was always lovely.


One miraculous January afternoon, however, granted my wish. I had a few hours between my computer course and Color Theory I. It had escaped my notice in the former that the weather had changed outside. So when I stepped out, it was into a world of white. I was stunned.

It seemed that no one else was impressed. They walked away without comment, leaving me to wander around the corner in a daze. I walked through a thin sheet of white to the end of the row, and there I stood next to my next classroom, just under the eaves with my hand out. My mitten preserved flakes just long enough for me to inspect them, and I spent several minutes doing this. I was delighted to find them all different and unique, and that this was something I didn't have to look under a microscope to find.

The snow fell steadily. There was no break in it. I spent the next two hours perfectly still, watching the waves of white cover everything. I had not a thought in my head and all I could think was peace and quiet. Oh, the quiet. It was such a lovely tranquility. I didn't even care that I was cold. All the snow made up for seventeen winters of nothing.