Visions of Sugar Plum Fairies?

In the morning, snow like a lace table throw across the mountains. Four deer just twenty feet from the window in my study, two adults and two first-years, feet padding the ground as gently as the flakes that fall from the sky. There is beauty in this motion that carries no sound. I lay awake and listened to the silence from bed.

Visions of Sunday night’s party at the old boarding school make silent motion too, though only in my mind’s eye:

The ridiculous, drunken look of victory at the card table when SO took the final hand and won poker. She thrust her tiny fists into the air, tossed her head back in foolish laughter, her torso rattling with each breath, hair cascading across her shoulders like a waterfall, and proclaimed her kingdom of cards and pennies and everlasting luck of the draw.

Or when sweet Eve, as we’ll call her, streaked through the living room, pausing underneath the threshold into the kitchen to hoist a jug of tonic in one hand and a jug of gin in the other high above her head. “The hot tub beckons you!” she said, wiggling her belly, sending fleshy waves across her bare breasts, down the length of her thighs. She wore a woven crown of lavender and nothing else, and as she turned to make her leave, with a gentle swivel of her pink toosh aimed in our direction, a few slivers of lavender fell to the ground and planted themselves into the hardwood floor, as if they sprung from her very footsteps.

To each her own, I think to myself as my vision fades into the saner aspects of alertness. They are but snowflakes in a windfall of love. And with this, I greet my day.