Sunday afternoon thaw

After days of feeling trapped indoors and under someone's thumb, I decided I'd had enough. After church and lunch, the kid and I went outside to do some sledding. Lo and behold, it was nearly forty degrees -- the sky was bright, the sun shining, eaves dripping. A great day for sledding, snowballs and snowmen. After an hour of getting sopping wet on the slopes at the park, we came home to the backyard and wandered around. We poked at the chunks of ice recently scraped from the roof; the kid climbed tentatively up the playhouse ladder and slid down the slide into a pile of wet snow. We threw snowballs at each other's feet, and I lobbed a few at the kitchen window. My husband appeared, scowling. "You're going to break the window" he said, frowning at the back door. I threw a snowball or two at the door. We'd gone outdoors to escape the caveman, as far as I was concerned.

"Do you want to go the bookstore?" he asked. Just before the kid and I went to the park, he was grousing at me for wanting to go the mall. I was hoping to get a copy of Quilting Arts. He was complaining about the mortgage payment and acting like my post-holiday season desire for a magazine was tantamount to proposing a trip to the Bahamas. Grumble grumble. "What, you're taking him outside?" He'd asked then. "Yes," I replied. "It beats sitting in here doing the same thing for the four hundredth time in the past two weeks."

So his bookstore proposal was a white flag, or at least a temporary cease-fire.

As we drove over to Roseville I found myself looking at the sky with increasing interest. Even the clouds seemed to have thawed -- patches of blue and streaks of pink tinted the gray landscape and the cottony undersides of the recently-impenetrable overcast. Like river ice, the clouds were breaking and sliding apart, mellowed into harmless rounded bits and cast adrift in the sun.