"Because it snowed last night and transformed the bleak prison grounds into a snow bank, we are on Code Red.

The shift changes slowly. Officers waiting to leave after working 12 hours loiter at the back door in their hats and coats and peer out the windows at the courtyard. Bundled up officers straggle in.

Wearing my blaze-orange hat, my fleece pajamas, and a blanket wrapped around me, I sit crosslegged on my bed, listen to music and making cards out of construction paper. My cellmate also has a production line on the bunk beneath me.

From time to time I stop and watch the world outside my four-inch-wide window. I see friends who work on the outside crew shoveling snow, kicking ice balls, sucking on icicles, falling face first into the powder and making angels. My roommate knocks on the window, an inch of glass and air that separates us from them; they come by, huge smiles, bright eyes, cold runny noses, and wave hello. One holds up her icicle for us to examine. It stirs a memory of being a child in Cape Breton and the stalactite icicles that formed on our eaves in a Canadian winter.

After dinner, when I am in the sallyport shivering and hugging myself, I listen in on the exuberant conversations around me. 'My mom said the best snow is on the roof.' 'My mom said you never used the first snow 'cause it will give you a sore throat.' 'Hey, you're talking about snow ice cream, right? I knew you were. My mom always made it. It's the best.' I thought how strange it was that here I was in the South learning about snow ice cream for the first time when, as a Canadian, I thought I had a well educated sense of snow and its uses.

Discussing the snow, my roommate and I talk about how 'they' (the outside crew under the instructions of an officer) will soon ruin it with gravel and salt. The gravel, we decide, actually makes the sidewalks slipperier and it tracks all over the prison. I have even found, in snowbound years, gravel in my bed. Besides the gravel makes everything look dirty and the rock salt burns the grass that was struggling to grow through the dry-baked clay.

We also worry about how the salt will affect the fragile water table. We're already on three showers a week. The politics of our ecology and conservation is small, although we have made the connection that short-term solutions invariably cause long-term problems.

Of course I don't disagree that our sidewalks and roads should be cleared of snow, but it makes me wonder what we would do to our sun if we could reach it, block it, shift it, and throw chemicals on it. The sun is frequently too hot, dangerous enough to cause diseases, and very expensive to our man-made environment so I know if we could, we would have a gigantic industry devoted to sun management. The fish, the frogs, the eagles would all die but we would have safer sidewalks.

Surely, it would be cheaper for the government to issue golf spikes to everyone this winter because if we master the sun as we have controlled the snow, we will undoubtedly throw the entire planet into a perpetual Code Red." (Elizabeth Haysom, Fluvanna Review, February 12, 2003).

Elizabeth Haysom is presently incarcerated at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women in Troy, Virginia. She is serving a 90 year sentence as an accessory to the murder of her parents in 1985. This column was first printed as part of a series, under the general heading 'Glimpses from Inside.'