One and only disclaimer: Do I have any official connection to the companies and people that make Harvest Moon? No, no I do not. I also did not come up with the tumblr 30 day winter challenge. All I own is the writing in this story.

Chapter One

Winter is a time for family, for children, for lovers. It's a time to come together and enjoy the holiday season with those we love; for drinking hot chocolate in the nippy air. It's for making snow angels and snowmen and kissing beneath the mistletoe. Sleigh rides and gift-giving, singing carols in the snow.

The smell of cinnamon and freshly baked cookies. Mmm.

It's the most wonderful time of the year, or at least that's what I used to believe.

After all, this is the winter I died.

But don't worry about me, I'm okay now. I'm simply here to tell you the story of my last winter in Castanet, that cute little town with the quaint friendly people. It's partially a love story, I suppose, but mostly a tale of my last fight: the fight for life and for happiness.

How successful I was, well… you'll find out soon enough.

This story starts a little over a year ago in autumn, right before harvest season started. I was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia (a nasty quickly spreading type of cancer) and was whisked away to the big city for treatment. Jin is a good man and an excellent doctor with great intentions, but his small clinic simply didn't have the means to rid me of my disease.

I spent months there, alone for the most part, horribly sick from the chemo and worried about my farm. I had visitors every now and then, mostly Kathy, but Chase would come along sometimes; those were my favorite days, when they came to cheer me up. Chase even baked me a cake on my birthday, but any of it that I had eaten was promptly thrown up.

Those months were some of the worst in my life, and after the doctors told me that the cancer had spread—that the treatment was not working—I had had enough. I left that hospital room, the chemo therapy that made me so miserable, and bravely decided to live out the rest of my days in the place that I loved.

They told me I'd be lucky if I lived for a year.

It was almost exactly a year of sickness later when I arrived back at my farm. I was wearily reunited with the townsfolk, shared a cup of tea at the inn with many of them and ate without losing my stomach contents for the first time in a long while. It was awesome. And so that brings us to the first day of winter.

The first snow was nowhere to be seen, the weather still much like autumn: nippy, but without the freeze winter usually brings. Regardless, I was freezing as I made my way to the clinic. It seemed the flu had been going around lately and in my condition, that's one of the worst things I could get.

"Hmm…" Dr. Jin made a concerned noise as he examined my throat. He then put his light and wood tongue presser down and took a quick glance at me. "Angela, are you cold?"

"Y-yes," I chattered out.

He narrowed his purple eyes as he took another glance. "You're bundled up as if there's a snow storm outside. There's not even a cloud in the sky."

I shrugged, knowing he already knew the reason why.

"Your immune system is severely compromised,"

Wait. What was that? Did I see a glint of pity in his eyes, a flash of grief cross his face? The usually stoic Jin, a doctor who had seen many illnesses all while keeping a calm, emotionless face—who reassured his patients that they would be fine without much enthusiasm—let his façade fall.

It almost hurt. I was used to being treated like a strong woman, a tough farmer who could take care of herself. Of course things had changed drastically, but still. Seeing him sitting there, his eyebrows slightly knit in concern; that bothered me. I swallowed the lump in my throat as he turned away to scribble on a piece of paper.

"Here," he handed it to me. "This is a prescription for some strong antibiotics. You have the beginning signs of a cold; I don't want it turning into something worse."

By worse, anything could be potentially fatal.

I thanked him and left as quickly as I could; I couldn't keep myself together for much longer. You know all those stories written about "strong women," the ones that keep up the fight, the ones who don't cry, who don't let their emotions ever, ever affect them negatively? How they use their trials to make them stronger? I used to think I was one of them, but now my mind has been changed. Those "strong" women? They were stuff of fiction. You can still be strong, you can still be a leader, but never being scared or lonely or just wanting to cry? That's just a load of false hope.

I was scared. I was lonely. Of course, I would try my best to keep up my morale for the sake of my own sanity, but I had no idea how long I would be able to do so without my health completely killing me.

When I arrived home, I decided that no matter how cold I felt, I had to take off some of my coats and sweaters. As a farmer, I knew that it was a very dangerous thing to overheat and having gotten very sick from heat stroke in summers past, I was somewhat wary after Jin's comment about my attire.

When all my jackets and sweaters had been removed until nothing was left but a thin tank top, I couldn't help but frown at my reflection in the mirror. Where my arms used to be toned and muscular were thinner, atrophied limbs. My deep tan from working in the sun all year round was faded to a paler, almost sickly shade of peach and dark circles had slowly become dominant features on my thinning face. I ran my fingers through my hair, which was quite a bit shorter than I normally wore in; it had only recently started to grow back from my time in chemotherapy.

Who was this woman looking back at me, the one with the careworn eyes and tired body? She had my face, but at the same time it wasn't me. No, it was more like looking at my mother, whose once beautiful and youthful face seemed to age ten years right after my father had left off to God knows where. I had only been two years old, so I had never really known what kind of person he was.

Maybe that's why I tried to be so strong, so independent—it was because my mother had been just that very way. She took responsibility for me, with or without a husband (whom she had loved with all her life), and raised me to be as self productive and independent as possible, but at the same time to accept encouragement and help when it was needed. I suppose that if she had been a bitter woman when she raised me, I could've turned out much different. At this difficult point in my life, I could have no one to call a friend, having put up too many walls to keep myself from getting hurt. But that wasn't how I was taught.

She made sure that before I left home, I knew how to put doors in those walls to let people into my life, but also how to let them out. She was the reason I turned out the way I was, but as the years passed after I was an adult, she became angry and bitter, the exact opposite of how she wanted me to be. I guess she didn't think that I would notice now that she had done her job to get me out into the world, but I did. I saw every line weariness had etched into her face, I saw the scowl she made when my father was brought up. And, sadly, that was how she had died, bitter and convinced that having loved that wretched man and been loved in return was worse off than having never loved at all, asking always to no one in particular, "why me?"

And as I looked in the mirror, that's who I saw: a woman giving up the fight, the fight for happiness and for life. That was who I was slowly becoming.

But I refused.

I could not let myself go down that path. While my mother was the person I respected and adored most in my life, I had the littlest bit of resentment that she had let all her talk of not needing anyone to be happy come back and turn on her. No, I would not become my mother.

And that's when I saw it: that little bit of fierceness come back to my eyes, the determined fight I could see in my face. This was me, it was who I was. I took one last look at myself and thought with a sudden flare of pride, I am my own person.

But I didn't realize just how similar I was to my mother at the same time.

With only one heavy sweater on this time and a steaming cup of coffee, I headed outside to examine my farm. I had tried to ignore the dry dirt, the unfruitful piece of property my field had turned into, but I suppose I had to face it at some point. Sitting down against a tree, I ran my fingers through the soil. Ah, it felt nice to have the cold earth pass under my hand, something I hadn't done for a year; it felt right, as if I was always meant to work with the ground.

I took a drink of the strong black coffee, having missed its smooth, bitter flavor. It felt almost as if there was nothing wrong with my body as I closed my eyes and breathed in the clean country air. Before I could comfortably nod off, a voice caught my attention and brought me back to the real world.

"Angela," Kathy was standing over me, a smile on her face, but worry was horribly obvious in her eyes. "I came to visit you, but you weren't in your house. I almost didn't see you out here."

"Oh," was all I managed.

After a moment of studying my face, she spoke quietly, "Are you okay?"

I looked past her, steadying my bottom lip from quivering with frustration. "I'm fine. I just thought I'd come out here and, you know... reconnect. Get back to nature, and all that."

She nodded understandingly and sat down across from me and closed her eyes. "Yeah, I get you," she breathed in deeply and listened to the bird calls for a moment. "It really is tranquil out here—a wonderful life you made for yourself."

"Yeah, I guess it is," I couldn't help but notice how she sounded so, so... past tense. She probably didn't mean anything by it, just making small talk, but since that morning my mind had been taking in things and turning them negative. Of course, I was incredibly thankful for Kathy's support and her attempts to comfort me; in fact, she had been one of my closest friends since I moved to Castanet. She had introduced me to Chase, the chef at her father's bar, and while I don't think he enjoys my company as much as I enjoy his, he certainly tolerates me with some amount of grudging approval.

We chatted for a bit longer, catching me up on the town gossip, who liked who, how she was sure that Owen would propose to her anytime soon now.

"Four years we've been together! Four years now, Angela, and still nothing!" She sighed in exasperation.

I couldn't help but laugh a little. "Maybe you should be the one to get the ball rolling. Go get that blue feather yourself, girl."

"Heh, maybe I will." Her gaze went somewhere distant, then her bright green eyes flickered back to me. "You still have that old thing?"

"What?"

She motioned with a flick of her chin towards me. "That horrible sweater. Why are you still wearing it?"

I looked down and smiled at the knit horse pattern. "I like it! After all, you're the one that gave it to me, so what are you complaining about?"

"I had no taste back then," Kathy replied wistfully.

"This was the gift that really made me realize that I had a friend here," I smiled as I remembered my first Christmas in Castanet. "I didn't have a single person to spend the holidays with; I was still the odd new addition to the town that wasn't quite at home. Then there you came, bringing leftovers from that night and a gift wrapped box."

"You seemed lonely,"

"But that was when I realized that in this small town that's full of traditions I never had, someone accepted me. And that was how I knew that I belonged here. And I'm still here, all because of you and this sweater."

"Well, I wouldn't quite put it that way," she said a bit mockingly, but the smile on her face said yeah, she gets me. "But if our friendship if represented by a hideous sweater, then I'm just a little bit scared to know what kind of friendship that is."

We shared a good laugh and I finally knew that I was back at home.

A/N: Yo, yo, yo, I'm back! Haven't written much fanfiction in a while, so I thought I'd end off my run on this site with a full length, thirty chapter story. I started this one over the summer, inspired by the themes from the 30 day winter challenge I found on tumblr. I'll put a link to it on my page so you can find it too. Aaand, because it's meant to be a consecutive thirty days, there will be a new chapter everyday until new years. I did something similar to this with Kingdom Hearts two years ago and I was really happy with the way it turned out. Check it out if you like ;)

Anyway, the theme for this chapter was sweaters. Also, I decided not to list this story under romance because I want it to be much more than that. Same reason why I listed Angela as the only character. So um, yeah :)

Reviews are more than welcome, let me know what you think so far!