We treated the forest like it was Paris

On Saturday, we strolled through the forest like it was Paris, spinning around on the spot, taking photos with our phones and saying “Look at this!” and sighing, “It’s so beautiful.” I felt for the couple skiing a few metres ahead of us, who maybe had thought they’d have a quiet morning, without snow tourists chatting behind them. Overnight we were gifted with 21cm of the best kind of snow, the thick, clean kind that coats branches and covers all the grey, the kind of snow that falls furiously all night long while you are asleep, and then in the morning floats down in lazy spirals, gentle and welcoming to walk through.

“It’s just like Narnia,” I said, with the predictability of anyone who has ever read Narnia and walked through a snowy wood. I realized, as I said it, that if we all could have agreed I absolutely had it in me in that moment to play Narnia, right there and then, like our kids would have when they were little. What would it actually take for adults to pretend so boldly on a Saturday morning? To call each other Lucy and Peter and pick up a stick, if you could find one under the snow blankets, and see it as a sword. We didn’t do it. But I could have, and I’m glad to be that weird.

We found some unbroken snow to tear apart, for snow angels. I asked Brent to take a picture of me making one, because I thought it would be kindof adorable. That I would be captured in a photo being adorable. “Okay,” he said, romantically, “But you look like you fell off a tall building.” I’m sure I don’t, I thought. But yes, I did. That’s exactly what I look like, sunk into snow, flat as a pancake, having one of the best days this pandemic has served up.