“do you wanna build a snow-squid?”

What do you get when you combine a day off with streets too bad to drive anywhere with the most amazing playing-in-the-snow snow of a lifetime?

A snow-squid, apparently.

I did not go outside planning to release the snow-kraken, although I fully intended to play in the snow. It is after-all the *most* perfect playing-in-the-snow snow I can remember. ever.

At first, I was just carving vines and scroll-work on the retaining wall that divides our front yard from our driveway. I dotted the scrolls with snowballs like some sort of beadwork. It was pretty. It was boring. I started losing interest. I stared at it one last time before going in for a break, looking at those snowballs, and an entire childhood of Calvin and Hobbes snow massacres flooded my head. I knew those snowballs needed to become little terrorized snowmen…

But what was their terror…?

The mound of snow from my husband shovelling the day prior heaped up just to the side of the wall… a bulbous head of a giant cephalopod. I went inside for breakfast.

I headed back out, first to stomp down the snow in back so our short-legged dogs could find some relief, and to remove a dropped branch so the blind dog wouldn’t impaled herself. I knew going in that I was retrieving the flailing arms of those poor near-to-death souls about to toss about on our wall.

I ran back in to grab some dried beans from the summer garden. Um, I mean, eyeballs. I ran in to grab some eyeballs.

The bottom of an old pill bottle whipped up the suckers on the tentacles with just a small tap. I had to fetch a chopstick to poke holes for the eyes and arms; the snow was that easy to compact and hardened that easily

I’ve been back inside for a few hours now, and I have been giggling non-stop. This has been a brilliant day. This idea that poured out of me landed perfectly imperfectly on the wall in our yard and manifested so nearly identical to the image in my head that I am stunned. And giggly. It is beautiful. It will melt. It will be gone from our lives quickly, but I feel less broken moving forward having remembered to be silly and goofy and to waste time playing in the snow in my early 50s…

This is me, smoothing over my cracks with perfect playing-in-the-snow snow and shining in the frosted wonderland of our wabi-sabi life.