A Sketch of a Morning Walk

   A girl with a cold nose and sloppy galoshes stepped out into the pre-dawn of an early winter day. Chapped hands stuffed deep in her pockets, piercing eager eyes looked out from a mess of tousled hair. Sloshing though a field of puddles the tops of her boots slapped against her calves, and a light breeze swept up to chill her face. She drank in the expanse of mottled gray sky overhead and the small thicket of deep red berries swaying lightly to her left. After ascending a mild slope she climbed up on a sturdy bit of fence, and taking an apple and a crisp new book from her ample pockets, began to read. The crack of tight binding was the beginning of a grand symphony that began to play in her head as she swept through the white pages. The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be marine phantoms.
   It seemed only a few moments later that a golden glow began to suffuse the distant hills. The girl shut the book with a snap, and hurried back down the slope. She slammed the door on cunning Jack Frost and set to cleaning dishes in the still-silent semidarkness of the kitchen, every now and then pausing to glance out the grimy window to marvel at tossing fir trees and fat little birds that scampered over wet and tangled grass.