Words for Wednesday: Winter

'Words for Wednesday' is a writing prompt held by Delores at Under the Porch Light.
Use some or all of the week's words, write a poem or a story or a fragment, and visit Delores' current week's prompt to let her know you've joined in.

I've only ever spent two winters in snow, once in Boston as a child (magical) and once in Fussen in Germany in my twenties (first couple of days magical, thereafter just a long, cold winter). So I have limited to zero experience living with snow and ice.  I've had a go at describing it here, hopefully it's not too laughably wrong. 

This week's words were:

incarcerate

phlegm

damp

groan

knife

blessing

Winter

The winter was like an incarceration, trapped in the house and everywhere you looked out the window was white. It was not silent. There was the wind and there were snapping twigs and icicles and sometimes the groaning and creaking of ice on the roof.

Inside the house the heater was on all the time, and the air grew thick. Our breath hung in the rooms, stale and close. There was constant illness, the rattle of phlegm in damp chests.

Spring sliced through all this like a knife. The sun was not warm but the season had turned and the gleaming wet of melting ice was like a blessing.