Sunday Shorts—A Winter’s Tale by Catherine Lundoff

[image error]There’s just something about winter that lends itself to magic. Fantasies and fables around the coming of the snow are plentiful, and yet I never quite tire of fresh new takes on the notion, and Catherine Lundoff’s “A Winter’s Tale” found in A Few More Winter Tales is no exception.

Here we travel with a young woman, Sanna, in a northern land, and she encounters a personification/embodiment of winter, but there is a connection that is both immediate and, perhaps, dangerous. A chance encounter and an act of kindness both seem small at first, but Lundoff weaves this lovely sense of magic in the North Wind, of cloaks and snow and seasons spun out of balance, and soon things are in peril.

Ultimately, I loved the cycle of the story, the sense that this is—like the seasons the story speaks so eloquently of—a telling and a retelling and this story will happen again and again. It’s a story about winter I’m happy to take in and hold as a mythology.