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It started with just a flake.
A small but sharp cold sting on his button nose, so startling and foreign that it made him stop in his tracks and look around. "What was that?"
His mum paused in her trot, adjusted the wicker basket of food digging into her arm, and reached for his hand. "No dallying, Bilbo, we need to get back before your Da worries."
"Mum, what is that?" He planted his feet and looked up, realizing the soft white fluff landing on him was not pollen or dandelion fluff as he'd thought; it was something else entirely.
Belladonna sighed and looked around, but she didn't stare in wonder as he did-no, she stared in wariness. "It's snow. Gosh, I haven't seen snow since I was a fauntling!"
“What’s snow?”
“It’s like rain but it’s gotten so cold as it falls that it freezes,” she explained, her hand tightening on her son’s as she pulled him back to motion and hustled towards home.
“Pretty,” Bilbo described, opening his mouth and sticking out his tongue so that he could taste it, as he had sometimes done with rain. He, like all hobbitkind, embraced the changing nature of weather because it nourished the earth and helped them grow the food that they all enjoyed. He, personally, had always loved the rain and had come home many a time covered in mud and sopping wet, to his mother’s chagrin.
“It is pretty, but it’s dangerous, Bilbo,” she admonished and her stern tone, so unlike her, made Bilbo pay attention. He was still a few years from grown, he still instinctively minded his mother like a good fauntling.
By the time they passed Gaffer’s farm, it had gotten heavier and the wind was picking up.
By the time they reached their smial, he couldn’t see further away than five strides ahead.
He watched from the window for the new week as the white drifts grew higher and higher and with it, his parents’ anxiety. His mother wanted to bar the door and stay inside but his father knew their vassals would need supplies soon. They had the largest smial in Hobbiton, and only one child; their spare rooms had been used for storage of food supplies for many of their closest neighbors. Neighbors that hadn’t been able to make the trek to retrieve supplies for over a week now.
Bilbo watched his dad bundle up, giggling at the shoes on Bungo’s feet with the light-hearted delight of a child. His dad patted him on the head and told him teasingly he was the man of the house now and to take care of his mum, and off he went into the swathes of white with a bag of food. His first stop would be the Gamgees, newly married and only just moved in a few months ago. They had no stores at all, having arrived in Hobbiton in the fall after the growing season.
When the howling began, Bilbo stayed inside by the fire, held in his mum’s arms.
They never saw Bungo again.