Gloves

This is a very, very tired smile--a smile that has been worn for forty-eight consecutive hours, and is beginning to fray. One hour in smile-time is one week in paper towel time, one year in cotton time, and a full decade in worsted time. This smile could be four hundred and eighty years old:

To what, one might ask, does this tatty old smirk owe its longevity? Why, to gratitude, i'faith--a melting, divine sort of gratitude, furnished by toasty palms and wool-swaddled forearms. I have, in yesterday morning's post, received the pair of hand-knitted gloves I ordered from Lina's site last week. Lina, Lina, my dried-out snagglefingers thank you from the marrows of their toasty little bones. My fingernails, like a chorus of brittle windchimes, tap out your praises on the keyboard: ratata-ratata-pitterpatter-kikikikiki! My fingerpads, once sad and blue, now sport a scandalous arterial blush, all for you.

(The creepiness of my glove-related gratitude is really quite boundless. I imagine I could go on for pages, using words like phalanges and wrinkled. I might even squeeze in a reference to translucent folds of webbing nestled in happy woollen caves.)

Fortunately for anyone stumbling upon this odd little pocket of glee, my strength is ebbing, and I shall soon be asleep. Just for the night, that is--not time for the dirt-nap just yet.

Here, a parting thought:

Two rats in autumn:
One, dried and frozen, drapes itself in the semblance of summer.
The other, impatient, builds itself an igloo.
Each thinks the other is living in a dream-world.
(Stella, however, is wrong. Sod off, Stella.)
Had I been possessed of even half my faculties, these sentiments would have been much clearer, and possibly in verse.