A/N: Ever since starting the 25 Days of Fic Challenge, I've been wanting to do an Arizona story. Day 21 (snowman) finally provided the right opportunity. The world of Frosty the Snowman is not my property.
The average low temperature in Phoenix in December is forty-five degrees, too warm for snow.
Karen knows this, the same way she knows which of the shopping malls play which versions of "Let It Snow," which they start on the day after Thanksgiving.
"Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow," she hums along. Most days, it's relentlessly sunny under the palm trees. Karen puts on sun screen automatically before so much as sticking her head out the door to retrieve the newspaper. She's no longer surprised to see a cactus wrapped in Christmas lights.
"I'll be back again someday," Frosty had said when he left her.
Between that winter and the next, her father took a job in Tempe, Arizona, population in 1970 of 47,907, all of them living in beige stucco ranch houses where the front yards were a wasteland of crushed rock surrounded one saguaro cactus. Twenty-five years later, her parents' neighborhood is still so new that the saguaros don't have side arms yet.
I won't be back. If she'd known, she wouldn't have had the heart to say it to her friend.
The rest of the family had embraced Christmas in Arizona with a fervor that could only be partly explained by the whimsy of wearing a Santa hat with shorts and flip-flops. The years of her teens were counted in waits at Sky Harbor for grandparents and uncles and cousins to come stumbling off a plane. Santa himself probably arrived in Terminal 4, unbuttoning his heavy red jacket as he hurried to the baggage carousels.
This morning is cloudy. She pushes her fists deep into her sweater pockets as she hurries from her own beige stucco rancher—she's an Arizonan now, with kids of her own who've never gone sledding or built a snowman—and that's when it happens.
The wind picks up, with a chill that tastes like peppermint candy and winter break and being nine years old. The first snowflake brushes her nose and melts before it hits the cement walk. The second lands on her outstretched hand. The third, on her tongue.
In the space of five breaths, the world blooms in white, like wildflowers breaking through the desert sand. Snow sticks between the needles of the saguaro. Snow frosts Karen's hair.
She kneels and grabs a handful, shapes it into a ball. Her first thought is to throw it, but then she sets it on the front step and rolls a smaller ball and a third one.
The snowman, when it's done, is no more than six inches high. There's not enough snow here to build another Frosty. There's nothing in her purse for eyes, unless a lost button counts. The snow is already letting up. By the time she gets home from work, her snowman will be nothing more than a damp spot on the concrete.
She has to say it, though she's not sure whether it's a promise to finally schedule the vacation time and buy the plane tickets, to go back to Armonk in the winter and teach the kids to make snowballs, or whether it's something else that she's been reaching for, these twenty-five years in the desert.
"I'll be back again someday."
A/N: On December 11, 1985, there was measurable snowfall in the Phoenix area.
