Hip Waders Strongly Recommended

I blacked out yesterday and came to with my hand in a bag of Trader Joe's Movie Theater Popcorn, a veritable bucket of chili on the stove in what could only have been a limbic, Pavlovian response to the mysterious white that has stitched up the city - emergency! they say. The only emergency I can see is that I tripped over some bliss and fell into a pile of tiny gloves mittens scarves boots hats coats left drying by the fire from this bonus vacation that turns our tiny house into an island or maybe a boat. Adrift in drifts and jewel earthtones warm inside with winds that buffet - buffet! I say - and mix with tiny squeals and sliding cardboard on forbidden ground - the driveway and into the street. Today nothing is forbidden, the fruit has been frozen and covered in a sparkling white dream where the outside world, bereft of grownups, is theirs to conquer and build and throw and wallow and slip-slide-sled. The boundary lines have been blurred in the ice and the world slips open just a little bit more. "Come in when it starts to sting" I sing and busy myself with soups and mugs of hot things for impossibly red faces and the hair! That glorious hair all matted wet and tangled up plastered places escaping upward from crowns and it's the hair of happiness. Tying knots in yarn with sticks and making more things to get wet and loved, pausing to add wood to the fire, sip my coffee, revel in the presence of my truly better half, my everything in this unexpected leisure of emergency! We listen for sirens and say silent prayers for those without their own boats or islands of warm woolen hand-knit comfort and fires and cocoa and assorted soups. At night the city holds its breath - its groaning, sighing, chirping dream state ceases and falls soundlessly asleep, buried deep in the cold. We lay and listen to the silence and further evidence it's only us and ours and now. We watch the scrolling tide of cancelled, postponed otherness - outside things on other planets than today. We walk the blurry lines to fill our bags with tasty things to comfort, keep us warm. I am regal in my cape - a carriage coat from the turn of another century, passed down by great aunt who's recently gone. I wear it, warm, and think of her and smile. I smile in my bowler hat, my hot pink rubber boots. Ridiculously warm and ridiculous, I sweep the tops of banks with its length. My footmen are brightly colored monkeys, my handsome prince carries my parcels and I am the queen of 12 blocks. I blacked out when I contemplated this life. This blessing of wonder and speech and the thousand million tiny web-like threads which some would break for some loose change jingled on top of a heap. I speak, I write, I think - I have these luxuries - this tiny bright candle of magnificence in the darker tides of human history. On other days I tremble to think of that tiny light quietly whickering away bit by bit in laws and bills and hate and greed. But today, I came to in order to celebrate. This is so much more than words. It's so much more than me. It's so large, this life that fits in my tiny house with a sloping driveway. So large and so brilliant I grasp only wisps and whispers of its magnitude.