Valentine Snowdrop
On the morning of February 14th, the first hint of spring crept into the little town of Briar Hollow. Icicles dripped from slate-gray eaves, and the snow blanketing the Victorian rooftops had thinned to lacy patches. The air carried that peculiar softness, a mingling of melting frost and earthy smell of the soil that whispered of crocuses and the renewing of life.
Mara, the town's librarian with her copper-red hair twisted into a loose bun, locked the heavy oak door of the century-old library. A crimson envelope lay on the welcome mat. No postmark, no name. When she broke the seal, a pressed snowdrop fluttered into her palm.
The note inside, written in a slanted hand she recognized instantly, read: "Meet me where the river bends. ~A friend who remembers."
Mara drew a sharp breath. The river bend, that secluded crescent where the Briar Creek widened and slowed, where a crooked birch tree with bark like peeling parchment had been her teenage sanctuary. It was where she'd shared thermoses of cocoa laced with cinnamon with Rowan Blackwood, before he'd vanished from her life. She hadn't allowed herself to dwell on that boy with the dark eyes and ink-stained fingers in years, or rather, she had, but only in those twilight moments between wakefulness and dreams.
She hesitated by the door for a heartbeat, then began walking with quickened steps, the envelope clutched against her woolen.
When she rounded the final bend in the path, she saw him. A tall figure beneath the same crooked birch, whose branches were now etched with delicate frost. A man with shoulders broader than she remembered, but with the same familiar tilt to his head that had once made her sixteen-year-old heart stutter. In his gloved hands, he held a small bouquet of fresh snowdrops, their stems wrapped in twine.
"Rowan?" The name escaped her lips in a cloud of visible breath.
He nodded, suddenly boyish despite the faint lines around his eyes. "I moved back last month," he said, his voice deeper than in her memories. "I kept trying to find the right moment to see you. Then I remembered this place, how it was always ours somehow."
Mara stepped closer, her boots crunching on the half-frozen ground. The river whispered beside them, dark water sliding beneath a thin crust of melting ice. "You remembered the snowdrops," she said, touching the velvety petals. "You once told me they were the color of hope."
And as they walked back toward town, side by side but not quite touching, the February snow retreated in earnest beneath the strengthening sun, revealing small patches of determined green as if the world itself, after the longest winter, was finally ready to bloom again.
Author Erika M Szabo
