Simone in Snow

Cocooning. I look out my third story balcony window at patio furniture, tree branches, rooftops. The snow has been falling all night, all morning. We were supposed to get a few centimeters accumulation. There's at least thirty lying on top of the deck.

Simone is sleeping in her bed, rolled up in a ball, quiet then dreaming, whinnying, leg jerking. I wake her up.

"Hey Simone, let's go out," I say and I open the sliding door to the balcony. She looks up at me, rolling eyeballs, nose still buried in her tail.

She looks outside. She looks back at me hoping perhaps I'll change my mind.

"C'mon, let's go," I say and she's a good sport and outside we go.

The snow is already up to Simone's belly when she takes a step into it and it's still falling. I can almost see it getting deeper. I remember diving into it when I was a kid, with my neighbour with the blonde hair and rose cheeks, and we lay there, warm and dry in our snowsuits looking as far as we could into the snow grey sky.

"You know if you're stuck in a blizzard in the Arctic, the best thing to do is to bury yourself in the snow," she had said to me. "It keeps you warm."

"Ok, let's try it," I said and I turned over onto my stomache, put my face in my mitts and she scooped snow on me. I could feel it being piled on over my boots, my legs, my back and finally around my head. It was noisy, all that snow settling against the hard nylon shell of my snowsuit. It was mildly scary, rather exciting. And when she stopped, there was no noise at all, just a faint glow when I lifted my head slightly and opened my eyes.

I would've stayed like that longer but I didn't want to keep my neighbour waiting. I pushed myself up, felt all the snow slide off the suit.

"Was it warmer?" she asked.

"Oh yeah, it worked. It was really warm," and I had indeed felt warmer but I wasn't sure if the warmth was from the insulating snow or from spending the afternoon with my neighbour.

"Do you want to try it?" I asked.

"No, that's okay," she said and I looked at her, trying to find some clue but I could not.

She frowned, waited on a thought, and then suggested, Let's build a snowfort instead, but I said, No, the snowbanks aren't high enough yet, and she said, We can shovel them higher, and I said, That's too much work, and so we talked back and forth about it for a bit longer and then she said she had to leave to go skating with her father, and I was too young to know that sometimes there is a meaning behind words which the words themselves do not mean, and so she left.

I'm not sure if I'm any wiser now.

Simone is giving me the evil eyebrows. Snow is accumulating on her. I take a few photos. We head back in.