The Sun Room was made mostly of glass. It looked out onto the hazelnut tree and the apple trees and the horses' field. There, Granny and I cut pictures of flowers out of gardening catalogues. I loved following the outlines exactly with my scissors. We glued the shapes into a collage on the walls around the windows. The bright colors made me happy.

Granny let me watch and imitate the way she made flowers out of crepe paper. They were as big as peonies, but I think they were roses, or perhaps imaginary flowers. Green sepals held the petals to wire stems wrapped in green paper. Granny taught me the word sepals.

I watched as she tipped out white clay heads from the molds she had made. She placed them among the flowers and painted them in shades of turquoise and gold, making the hair a rich black like her own had once been.

"Nefertiti was the most loved wife of the Egyptian King," she said. "One of her titles was 'Sweet of Love'."

"When people love each other, can it last forever?" I asked her. "Do you still love my granddad?"

I had no memory of my grandfather but I had seen photographs.

"When I saw your grandfather walking along Brighton Beach with two children," my grandmother said, "I knew it was fate. I knew that we were going to marry."

"How did you know?" I asked. "Did you know that you loved him?"

"I just knew it was fate that I would marry him," she said. "And I did."

"Did Granny love your dad?" I asked my mother later.

"They stayed together," my mum said. "I think she must have loved him once. But at the end, she used to say she was going to put rat poison in his food."

My mum found Granny on the floor in the kitchen next to the Sun Room. Later, laid out in her coffin, I wondered where she had gone. Her face looked smooth and white like clay, but her hands were translucent like crepe paper. Someone had painted her cheeks and lips pink, and her eyelids turquoise although she never wore eye shadow in life. I didn't see my mother cry, but I knew she had because she wore dark glasses and her face looked sad. I wanted to ask if the love could last if the person wasn't there, but it seemed as silly as asking if that was really my grandmother in the coffin.

Snow is "frozen crystalline water" that "precipitates from clouds" and "ultimately melts, slides or sublimates away." Snow is the condition under which my three-year-old son and five-year-old daughter built an igloo in Riverbank State Park in the year I learned that I would be raising them alone. My son always loved to feel the cold in a way that I couldn't understand, and dove into the snow repeatedly until the chill began to burn. My daughter loved snow for its beauty and the way she could build things with it.

It's snowing today and now the seasons seem both more temporary and more absolute. The snow will pass but when the next one comes, how much more will have changed? My son is in university now, and my daughter is traveling. My mother is in the house I grew up in, observing the clear, dull sky through her bedroom window. When the next snow comes, will she still be there? Will my son or daughter be here? Will I?

As a girl, I used to imagine what it would be like when I was grown up in a house with my own children and family. When my daughter asked me what the main purpose of my life was, I said it was to have her and her brother. I still feel that, and until last year that was the center of everything I did. I never thought about what it would be like when that was over, when they didn't need me in the same way.

Even the idea of finding a partner was connected to the idea of having children, and when that was no longer a possibility I found that the nature of my desire changed. I have come to love solitude and freedom. I no longer pine or yearn for things I can't have. But I still love those moments of connection that come, like the snow, with the mystery of not knowing how much will have changed by their next visitation.