stuff inside

I was walking on our old street this afternoon with my younger daughter and we passed by our old house. This always makes me tense up a little, wondering if seeing the only home they knew up until a few months ago makes the girls feel weird, displaced, sad--they never say anything and my own feelings seem to always get in the way in the way of asking.
Today though, there was a big debris box out front and the windows were papered down. The new owners must be gutting the place. For my daughter, I kept my eyes ahead and feet moving forward, but in my mind I was bounding up the steps by twos to peek in. I wanted to see if it looked like my own insides, gutted of old hopes and dreams, brittle and crumbly like the plaster in those old walls, which when touched with any force at all, end up as a fine dust over everything nearby.
Just then it started to snow, big fluffy flakes, my daughter laughing with delight as they landed on her nose. She said when they landed on you, the snowflakes were kisses and when they missed and hit the ground they died, but the ones that kissed you wouldn't die, they would go inside your body, kill any germs and other bad things they found there and get them out of your body. We must have looked like a pair of drunken sailors, weaving about the sidewalk trying to manouever ourselves into the paths of all those snowflakes.