Chip Crumbs on the Snow

There are chip crumbs on the snow, and waterproof pants seem like a fallacy when you've been sitting on wet slush for half an hour.

Are they actually damp, or is your bum just numb?

Surrounding us, mountains watch over the high-plains.

I realise they have seen an earth very different to the one I see now, and will see one that is different again, long after we are gone.

The wind reaches icy fingers out over the great white expanses.

It listens to the quiet conversation between friends, before it sweeps the bundle of words away over the landscape.

I realise that although these words will never exist anywhere 

but this cold mountaintop on this bright winter's day, the memory of this feeling will always exist everywhere, 

as everything that I am will exist in the family that I will leave on the earth long, long after I am no longer here to remember the chip crumbs on the snow.