SOLAR WINTER by COLDHEALING
March 13 2026
She grew up in the South, so she was warmer than what I was used to. I grew up in Illinois. She
was living in Florida for school. When I first met her, in a parking lot in Fort Myers, she was
sitting on the roof of her car, waiting for me. I had never seen anyone do that before.
I met her on a Christmas break visit to my grandparents in Florida. Like many Midwesterners,
my grandparents retired in the South to escape the winter. Most years my parents drove me and
my siblings down to Florida for Christmas to be with our grandparents, and to soak some of the
warmth ourselves. On this trip, I left my family for an afternoon to go for a walk with her. I was
now old enough to drive myself so I could do that.
After I went back north to Illinois we kept talking. Because we lived in different states we talked
in our phones. We met in our phones initially, so it was okay to return to that after we met
in-person, at least from my perspective.
One day, I was on a hike in the snowy Illinois woods. I sent her a photo of my hand holding
snow. I joked that I could eat the snow on the hike so I wouldn’t need a water bottle. She
responded with a photo of her hand holding sand from the beach, asking if she could do the
same with that. The words didn’t matter much to me, but I liked the two photos. Both snow and
sand are composed of tiny grains, so there were grains of snow and sand on both our hands in
the photos, which felt intimate. Both photos were lit by the same sun, shining through the same
clear blue sky above all of America on that January day.
Scrolling up and down in our message chain, looking at our two photos, I felt like this winter
might be different from all my winters before. This winter might be warm somehow. It might be
possible for me to hold the warmth of her Florida up here in the north. It might be possible to
hold it so tightly that I could stay warm through the winter, even though it would be harder for me
than it would be for her. I could really try this winter. I could dress warmer, I could seek out the
moments of sun. I could listen to summer music when I drove. Maybe I could take another trip to
Florida? On a weekend or something. If I got cold, I could grab more of the warmth, like
rekindling a fire when it burned low. I could carry the fire back up here like a torch. Florida and
Illinois were not separate locations; they existed on a south-to-north gradient of warm to cold. I
knew it was a gradient because I had seen the whole thing from the backseat of my parents’ car
as we drove home. I knew because we were under the same sun now. If it was all a gradient, I
could pull her warmth up here.
The phrase in my heart for this feeling was “solar winter.” Solar winter felt like when you’ve been
outside for so long that you forget your hands are cold, and then you come in, and your hands
feel unexpectedly cold and warm at the same time.
Coldhealing grew up in Illinois, and now lives in New York City.