We liked snow. It was one of the few places we were friends. Born both in October, not even a year apart, we were estranged twins. Dressed and coddled and cramped into the other, we fought daily for space and our own identities. We didn’t wear shirts or shoes in the summer, we played Cowboys and Indians with the neighborhood boys, we hunted for frogs and hid them in our babysitter’s bed. We said, poop and fart and damn.

Nights held our soft secrets, our stories. After our parents tucked us in and moved to the living room, we’d lay in our beds, in our all-lilac room, a slow breeze making shadows ache sideways across the wall, and whisper to the other, poop, fart. Damn. We did that for a while, my sister crawling into my bed, wrapping herself around me, rubbing her cold feet against my own. And later, when we huddled close in the closet, head-to-head, playing library or sharing Playboys, we were friends. Or, when it snowed. We could both feel it coming. A soft quiet filled us, things would settle. She wouldn’t try to kill me and I’d tolerate her presence.

During a snowstorm, the house closed in around us, its arms raking us in. Dull light spilled through living room windows and snaked its way down the hall. We’d be at its end, each of us on either side of our A-frame chalkboard. I had my side for drawing and painting. A clip sat at its top, from which I hung paper. So I’d clip in sheets and paint, while she used her side to draw with chalk, and erase, and draw again.

Sometimes this annoyed me, all the erasing, all the recreating, while I continued to make just one thing. Sometimes I think I resented her ability to wipe away what was, knowing intuitively, even while it was being created, that it was a part of something else. That split moments change a person. That when snow goes away, it takes something with it.

For years, when mornings were deep gray and snow fell in wet clumps and the radio told us we were free, my sister and I scrambled to get out of the house and under the branches of the squat, old pine that sat in our yard. It was our fort, our secret hideaway the neighborhood boys hadn’t yet discovered. It was natural cover, a place no one would think of because no one had created it, mangled or manipulated it into being. It simply was.

Under boughs bent heavy and low, we stripped frail branches of their needles. Then, lying back, our heads propped on snow banks piled around us, we’d smoke our pine cigarettes and watch the sky through the cracks in our tree. We’d lay in our place, in the deep hush and quiet of the late afternoon, for our mother to call us in, or the dogs to wander close, or the boys to find us.

We’d watch the clouds, the growing gray, and pretend we were teachers, detectives, pilots, Amelia Earhardt or Jacques Cousteau. In the shadow of those pine boughs and under the weight of that wet snow, she never once imagined herself a slip of silver, a shadow, an erased impression of who she was, who she would come to be. Under that tree, she was in the foreground, bottom center, lying in the snow, her legs crossed at the ankles, one hand tucked under her hip, the other red and raw and cold, waving a pine cigarette in the air, all celluloid, a flash of light. Gold.

I remember her now, at the chalkboard, on those lazy afternoons, how she welcomed change by wiping, wiping, and making room for it, and how it made me crazy. I wanted to hold each moment. Make it into something. Make it stand. Hold onto it like the image of us in snow. And I wonder, am I doing this now? Thinking if I can recall her, put her in the foreground of my memory and hold her there, in a sketch of words, she won’t be lost? She won’t be out on some flatland street in Florida, cast in yellow light, selling pieces of herself, the comfort of dark days at the end of a hall, to some drugged up drunk, with extra cash or a bottle of beer. Will she remember the growing blanket of white that covered the yard and dipped the branches low? Will she erase this too?

She took away with her all the pictures, all the photos my parents had of us growing up. Maybe at the beginning, when we believed there was still hope, somewhere inside she knew there was none. That she was changing to sleet and rain and back again. That in these quick, Polaroid moments, she was captured. That she was. And she took them to remember this.

When I visited her one summer—the summer we biked on Martha’s Vineyard and made up bad songs—I took some pictures back from her. I took us playing dress-up in old prom gowns, us in our twin Easter suits—pink checked coats and dresses my mother made—in white gloves and patent leather shoes, holding matched purses. She was still a boy, bent at her knees and ankles, her feet wanting out of the hard shoes. In one picture, her hat is tilted over an eye, in another an untended glove dangles from her small, square hand. In all of them, she carries her purse like a burden. In the end, a glove was lost. Her hat too.

I took others. Us in the front yard, in summer dresses, squat and round against trees, in the paddock, rubber boots up to our knees, a brush in each hand, grooming tails, wiping legs down, our heads bent low under saddles and stirrups. Or on the beach, naked and wicked, our bathing suits lost on the land or to the sea, or in the kitchen washing dishes in the orange shirts we were crazy for. The orange shirts we wore on the night everything went wild.

It was one of those mad nights when rain whips in sheets and wind screams and lights flicker on and off and on again. Everything was electric, on fire, alive. Our dog had just given birth to puppies. That late spring, my father taught us how to reach our small hands up inside our beagle and pull out its puppies, one at a time. That spring my father taught us about life and death and renewal. That parts were not removed, erased or forgotten, but rather, that each small intention created a whole, left an impression that could not be wiped away. I wonder now, as she moved from drink to drink, what parts she erased of herself, what parts she omitted from her whole. Like the glove and the hat, what parts did she lose?

The night cracked and switched. We were in the kitchen, four and five years old, when a tree came down, when we realized one of the puppies wasn’t in the box. Our parents and our babysitter, Anne, ran out into the night’s lightening and hollered for it. We could hear them. We waited at the door.

The screen door banged against the side of the house, the windows rattled. The lights went out. It was our first encounter with the possibility that things might not turn out all right. That the world wasn’t safe—that it could take things from you and not even blink.

In the end, all three of them plowed through the door at the same time, our orange shirts were soaked, from holding it open. In one picture that night, we are at the sink washing dishes, playing grown-up. In another, we are in the living room, our smiles caught on something inside, tentative, unsure. Anne is holding the puppy. Our orange shirts are flat up against us.

I took the photos to take back parts of ourselves, part of who we were together. There are only a few, and they are only of us until we are seven or eight years old, just before we wore shirts in the summer. Just before change came, soft skin folding over knobby hips and shoulders, turning us, tuning us, into new curves and false promises.

And I think to myself, maybe she was right to erase. To wipe out what was, to recreate before a form took shape, before it held her, defined her intentions in chalky outlines. And I know, in the same moment, that’s not true. Because no matter how much erasure takes place, it still leaves a shadow impression, forms that lurk and emerge, forms that can create new wholes.

And I remember our time in the snow, under the heavy pine boughs, and I think to myself, as much as snow takes something with it when it goes, it leaves something too. It melts, washes what was, into sliver streams that cut their way into curves of crunched up land, making it smooth again.

I also think it leaves something else, an indelible mark, a memory of a time and a place. A sweet taste. A time we were together, and safe, and there were chalk drawings and muffled afternoons, and hot chocolate on cold days and whispers at night. And a secret fort, and you and I, alone. And I wonder if you remember the snow. And the time we smoked tree cigarettes and were quiet and were friends. There are no pictures of us in the snow. And, I think to myself, there should be. And I wish that you had been able to take them, that you had pictures of us in the snow.