The fireplace is going crackle, crackle, crackle, and when I look into it, I amuse myself by thinking up ways to describe the flames.
They leap. They dance. The flicker. They flare. They lick the logs. They lull me into my mood for today’s column.
Lazy.
It is so nice and warm in here. No doubt, those pretty flames are consuming the oxygen that my brain needs to function. Being oxygen-deprived, I have a perfect excuse to be ineffectual. I am, today, as useless as an ornament on a tree. One that doesn’t light up or flicker or pulse or feed starving children or bake bread or remove calluses or alleviate any of the world’s financial woes.
That’s me (it would be “I,” if I had the strength to be grammatically correct, which I don’t.)
I am a holiday ornament, on vacation from being meaningful, relevant, insightful, inspiring, or thought provoking on this lovely, lyrical, lollygagging, languorous day.
I did do something purposeful, though.
I made tea. Vanilla tea with lots of chemical sweeteners and a dear little tag that hangs over the side of the cup like a flag, waving, “Hey, there. Open a novel, wrap an afghan around your knees, snuggle on the sofa, hug your ferret, and drink me.
A ferret is a perfect pet for a writer who is a useless holiday ornament on a lollygagging winter day, because a ferret doesn’t do anything. You can drop a morsel of food three inches from its mouth, and it won’t find it unless you point the ferret’s nose at the dish. It can scamper out your front door, and even if it were no more than two feet away, unless you picked it up and carried it back into the house, it would never find its way back. It can never go for a walk. Nope. Never. Absolutely impossible. If you put a harness on a ferret, which is like trying to put a silk sock on a slinky, instead of going for a walk, it will take you for a zigzag. Move three steps forward. Stop. Dig in the grass. Retreat four steps. Stop. Scramble up your pants leg. Scramble down. Stop. Chase its tail. Stop. Raise its head. Begin to run frantically as if being chased by Lord Voldemort and an army of Death Eaters. Stop. Climb back up your pants leg.
Some ferrets, if you ring a bell, will come. Others, like mine, just look at you with a quizzical expression on its face that conveys the thought, “Are you food?”
What ferrets do most, best, and infallibly, however, is make their owners laugh.
So, laughing is one more thing that I have been doing on this idle, idyllic, inert, and immobile day.
