I can hear the dishes clinking in the kitchen as my mother is washing them.  She is mumbling a little song as light as a sleigh pushed by the wind.
 
"If you cover yourself up and lay quietly with your eyes closed, it will start to snow."  She tells me.
 
I go to bed with one hand under my head and when I look at the oranges standing in a line on top of my dresser, one falls down and rolls next to my bed.  In falling, the orange splits the same way my dad splits them and gives me the bigger piece.
 
And there she is, standing and shivering in the cold room—a tiny orange fairy looking up at me.  She giggles  and flys around the room like a bumblebee.  I follow her with my eyes, sometimes seeing her clearly; other times feeling only the air move gently above me to mark her passage.  On the windowsill, she lands on the edge of my abandoned cup of milk.
 
“Want to see a miracle?”
 
I get up and approach the window.  The floor is cold as I pad across it with bare feet.  Once decorating the window, the white ice flowers are gone—the window is clean and clear.  I hear buzzing from the air around me…the sky is very white and freckled with blue sparkles.  The fairy lands in my open palm with translucent wings buzzing like a dragonfly.  More and more glowing flakes fill the air.
 
“Snow!”

It is like this: the snow is blue—blue is the first snow.  The first flakes are blue and falling gently with a buzzing, humming sound like a cloud of bees.  The ground is blue.  The trees are blue.  The fence, covered in a soft blanket, is blue.  Later I see flakes of mixed colors—blue-blue and blue-white.  And then white-blue and increasing white.  White-white stars falling from the sky.
 
“Snow!”
 
I open the window and the fairy flys out.  She becomes one with starry snowflakes and I can not tell them apart.
 
“My little princess,” says my mother, “your feet are frozen, you slept without a cover.”
 
“Come on!  Get up!  Let's see how our courtyard has changed overnight.”
 
Mom takes my little hand and walks to the window to see the snow covered yard.  She does not know—but I know everything.  She does not know that I talked to the orange fairy and that I saw how the season’s first snow started.
 
The house smells like marmalade.  Mom gathered the oranges from the top of my dresser, sliced them and simmered their flesh in a big pot until the house smells like a fairy tale.
 
The next year, I'll ask my father to open all the oranges before the first snow so I can see the fairy .

Oh, how I wanted to see the orange fairy and the first blue snow of winter.