It was a cold winter night, a fairly cliché night, the kind of dry cold when your breath freezes as soon as it escapes your lips. The sky was as imperfect and black as charcoal, the ground was covered in snow, as if to outline the roads and cityscapes, and the lights above sprayed down to cover any puddles that had formed with a warm glow. The scenery was perfect for a short walk. The streets were filled with friends and families, reminiscent of movies made for the holidays: some were pleasant and filled with love, some were bitter farewells, and some were joyful greetings.

On this night, a night as familiar as the sun was bright, I found her. She immediately captivated me. Her glow was brighter than the streetlights, her hair was as sleek and much more beautiful than the sky, her demeanour was cold, yet somehow still welcoming. She asked me for directions to the nearest pharmacy where she could purchase cold medicine. It made me more worried about her than a person giving directions should be, and so I rushed my phone from my pocket, searching for directions to the nearest pharmacy. When I finally found her the address, she briskly walked away.

Oddly, watching her turn to leave felt heart wrenching. This may sound overdramatic, however it was as if she had begun a departure from my life I had never wanted, like the death of a loved one, or a fire burning down the house you grew up in. Yes, it worried me that I had become this attached to a person I had only exchanged a few words with. A person I would never likely speak to again, I regretted never asking her her name.

It seemed only a few minutes I was standing there in the dry cold, gazing in the direction she fled my life from, and there she was returning. As she walked up to me again, shopping bag in hand, she smiled a cold smile in my direction.“Thank you” she said to me, and then once again she was gone, I had no reason to call out to her, and yet I did.

”What’s your name?”

“My name is Winter.”

Unsatisfied with simply knowing her name, I asked further, “Do you live around here?”

“I do. I live where the snow falls and where the roads are lit by streetlights, I live where there is joy and where there is sadness, I live where it is cold and where warmth comes from the people surrounding us, I live alone, but with others, my home has everything I need but I have nothing. I’m homeless. Thank you for the directions.”

Hearing this shook me to my very core. How could a woman this beautiful, as elegant and clean as she was, have no home?

That year, I had been alone a lot, with nothing better to do other than look at the scenery and observe the movie-like developments from people as they stumbled out of shops. As such, I had grown accustomed to seeing Clichés and a number of odd occurrences. However, something about Winter shook me out of my reverie. Winter explained that she was getting cold medicine with the last of the money she had, knowing she and her neighbours would need it when the cold made them ill. As she walked away, this time, I knew I could catch up to her, and so I did. I followed her to where she had set up her residence, a small make-shift village on a side street made of cardboard box lean-tos and whose holes were patched with bits of Christmas wrapping. The people there in the camp welcomed Winter. Somehow, while they seemed as if they were not very familiar with her, they still accepted her into the warmth of their shelters. This sight, kind people, people who welcomed a face unlike theirs, with no hostility, and these people were forced to live on the streets, I found it unacceptable.

That December, the money I would have spent on meaningless things, I spent on others. I built better shelters, I brought warmth to the village that had obviously been absent for many years. It wasn’t enough; The shelters did not save them. My new friends’ lives were still spent begging for another chance at life at the side of busy roads, treated like they were less than people, like they were weak, like they were pitiful. That winter, I watched as faces walked past with no glance paid to the homeless people. And then only days later, these people who had paid no attention to those who had fallen into poverty, fell into poverty themselves, even as growth came to these people and they learned better, they remained at the bottom.

This was unacceptable. When the next snowfall came, I raced out my door, bringing old clothes, blankets I didn’t use, sweaters I had grown out of. When they received them, they could not have been more thankful. It was heartwarming to see the smiles of so many people. It wasn’t even close to enough though, and so, throughout the entirety of January, I used the fresh snow to build shelters, I made snow playgrounds for the children at local parks, and at each home, and at each shelter, I left requests for help from those who walked by, for some help in building more.

I’d never seen economic poverty, but when I saw the loving and warm faces of the people who had been ignored by society, I decided to help. You see, it never took me becoming poor to decide to help others. All it took was the realisation that there is no one safe from economic failure. No matter how bright you are, how beautiful you are, no matter how smart you may be, you might one day end up in the same places you ignore.

Winter would soon be over before I realised I had made an impact. The snow was soon to melt, and many of the shelters I had built were nearly obsolete, but change didn’t stop. Faces I had seen walk the streets, then fall down to beg on those same streets, had returned to their lives, but after that one night, that one Winter night, I had never seen the woman who captivated my attention again. I often wondered if she was even real, but as the last snowfall of the year melted and the snow returned to the sky, a thought crossed my mind, “If I ever see her again, it will probably be next Winter, and I hope she’ll be proud of me.”