Sandwiches and Sledding

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I didn't want the peanut butter and jelly sandwich so much as it wanted me.  It was calling my name most insistently: so insistently I must brave the cold basement to pull the rye bread from the freezer and bring it up, toast it, and slather it with the blackberry jelly that was just begging to be eaten.  The kitchen is and was a riot of muck like something from a story by D.H. Lawrence... hideous writer.  And hideous kitchen.  I duck and run for cover every time I enter in this state.  Of course the charge will have to be made, but not until the offensive unit is sufficiently prepared.

Somersault? I haven't done a somersault in some years, thank you very much.  Not willfully, at any rate... and to go flying backwards, heels over head, careening wildly and shrieking like an uncivilized banshee over a jump made by bolder sledders than I (and probably younger), adventure-seekers who must needs add an obstacle course to a perfectly beautiful, tall and entertaining enough slope.  And I forget how I landed.  Or would have landed if I had done a somersault in the snow today.  Which I didn't.  Willfully.  

Hot cocoa does wonders for the nerves... such wild palpitations Mrs. Bennett never dreamed of, that make one do all sorts of things, (never mind alcohol or other hallucinogens, just a little snow and imagination are enough and too much for most steady adults to keep their heads), and probably would have finished her... Mrs. Bennett, I mean.  Anyway, fancy her, bonnet, ribbons, and all, go flying down a slope on a sled, only to go sweeping over a jump fairly like a ski jump, and what might be left of her when she landed flop! in the snow on the other side.  Makes one think, doesn't it? One of those deep, literary images...

Anyway... hot cocoa. Homemade. With fresh whipped cream, real and rich and ridiculously fat... mmm.... wish I ever retained any fat but unfortunately I am and it seems always will be mostly skin and bones. Lots of bones... shins, and ankles, and spine, and all that... lots of hard bones, to ache after ignominious thuds.  Bones that creak when one tries to rise after landing flat on one's back and backside, attempting to rise with little or no wind left, like Rome after its fall; pitiful attempts one is embarrassed to write about, at least until one is fortified by peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on toasted bread.  And the hot cocoa with the whipped cream, never forgetting the cream for with such  luxuries empires are built and wasted.  

Bah; I was going to write more educatedly about the Victorians.  Research and all that.  But after brandishing an icicle a couple of feet long like a sword and balancing on a rail outside the house, I feel a little too brash to handle the Victorians.  Of course, I'd better be suited to horse-back riding at a gallop right now, but I have had enough falls for one day.  As I was saying though, the icicle.  My very dear friend has always had a fetish with the Snow Queen.  Don't care for her much, myself; my taste in villains feminine runs more toward Lady Macbeth and Queen Jadis (before the hundred years winter and all that).  But then you know what Robert Frost says... or perhaps you don't.

"Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I've tasted of desire,

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice."

Anyway, for the benefit of my friend I thought I'd just strike a pose as the Snow Queen and send her an evil-looking picture with my love.  She will be jealous, I know; she likes the Snow Queen because secretly she wants to BE the Snow Queen.  At least, that's my theory.  But now!

Back to my sandwich...

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, by John Singer Sargent. Wikimedia Commons.