TODAY - I will be as Shakespeare was-

My body was frozen in the position in which I had woken. An excruciatingly sharp pain in my lower back had summoned me from my slumber. I was enveloped in obscurity in my heavily shuttered and draperied room. A fear began to swell in my chest and throat and just narrowly escaped through my lips in a low pitched groan. With the pain always came the panic. I wondered briefly, "Am I alive?".
A sudden gust of freezing air surrounded me and a blinding light came from the doorway. She entered in a whirlwind of flurries, the illuminating Eastern sun behind her, igniting like flames the pure and glittering snow that had blown in as she stepped through the realm of day and into my nightmarish reality. She tore off her coat and threw it carelessly in the water that had accumulated on the mud smeared floor from her previous trips in from the cold.
As she turned to face me my fear began to dissipate. She wore a brilliant smile and her eyes gleamed with excitement. Not the ill-mannered teen-aged toddler that I had feared and half expected, but instead the exuberant not-yet-quite-a-teen that still called me "Mommy" when feeling happy as she did in this moment. Sometimes, while she was in the throws of  the afore mentioned mind-set, my name became "Bitch" or "I Hope You Die", but not now. This moment would be a good one and I felt free to relax and join in the excitement over the magnificent spectacle of snowfall that was currently twirling and swirling about the atmosphere and settling in our yard. Homes,cars, roads and lawn clutter became cleansed of their normally exposed sins. The man made obstructions of the natural world were now laden with the magical blemish concealing powder that fell from the sky. The ancient and majestic trees stood as if praying with open arms and gazing in awe at the heavens while they caught the soft snow in their hands and their arms grew heavy with the never ceasing down flow of gifts that accumulated so quickly upon their boughs.
With her ability to metamorphose from one moment to the next, I knew that my daughter might not stay in her current mood for long. Given the beauty of the snow and the child-like joy of my 11 year old, I knew that this moment, back pain and all, was not to be taken for granted.  I revelled in delight at the new fallen snow and at the happiness and wonder of my amazing little girl.




"as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind."

                                                                      -Sir Thomas Wyatt