But I slept oddly well, being the sun for a world of blankets, filling them with warmth so that I dreamed of lying on a summery beach where someone splashed icy water on my head, but I enjoyed it because it was so refreshing. There was a sound from behind me as of a cat lapping from a bowl. Then I drifted off to sleep (in the dream) and while sleeping I was buried deeper and deeper in warm sand which became uncomfortably heavy and I woke (actually) with a cat lying on top of me deforming my back. The room was terribly cold. I could hear the water running (with cat-lap sound) from the down spout.
Reluctantly, I pulled myself from the blankety warmth of the bed and hurriedly dressed. Upon opening the drapes, I saw a gray and white world, the air still streaked with rain and flecks of snow. The slushy street is now curbed with a mixture of wet snow and brown pine needles, smudged here and there with the residue of automobile exhaust. The undisturbed snow covering the yard is like a lake of frozen milk in which gray patches of translucent watery ice are floating.Within, I can see blades of grass and the dark shapes of fallen leaves. The bush at the end of the walk wears a lid of snow, broken only in one spot where the frozen weight has pulled the branches apart. From that opening, a small brown bird emerged. It stood looking at the wintry landscape for a moment and began chirping "what! the! hell? what! the! hell?"
No snow sticks to the bare branches of the mulberry tree. Instead, its twigs are decorated with sparkling drops of water which tremble and fall when the fluttering birds alight for a moment. The bright drops seem unduly festive next to the few forlorn leaves which cling here and there, but they also bring to my mind the incongruous image of sweat beads on an exhausted runner. The day is too strange for me. I ought to have remained asleep in my warm cocoon of blankets, dreaming of the beach until spring bade me emerge, when my thoughts could play like butterflies amid the new flowers.