This is Sandee.  I got a surprise monday request, so I'm posting
today,(tuesday), as well.  If you post to my mailbox, please put the
word 'ferret' somewhere in your subject line.  At this point I'm getting
so much amazing Spam that I'm afraid that I'll miss someone with a funky
name, like 'Vi*gra" or "Babe."  I'll just delete by accident!
 
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Hi, all.  I met a little guy coming across the Bridge.  His name was
Merlin, and he had one of the deepest, thickest, softest coats that I
have ever seen.  It must be because he lived way up north in Minnesota
in the Land of the Living.  A coat like that just calls out for a trip
to somewhere snowy, and that is just where Merlin wanted to go!  His
Business of Dale, Wiz, Chip, and Mac helped him into his brand new wings,
and we lifted off, one by one.
 
We flew due north, and saw the long grass and broad leafed trees give
way to blueberry bushes and sedges.  This was the land of our cousin the
wolverine.
 
The pines finally disappeared from the land, and then we saw the trees
give way entirely to twisted little willow bushes and sprays of wild
azalea that hugged the cold ground.  Finally, we could see our tiny back
shadows cast on a landscape of gray stone and pale green splashes of
lichen peeking out from beneath a thin apron of snow.  We were VERY far
north, indeed!
 
The air was so thin and so frosty up here, it was like licking a cold
piece of glass!  Our noses stung in the wind.  We could see the
occasional set of tracks in the snow that let us know that our cousins,
the ermine, had been by.  Ermine are very shy, it is rare to see them.
They look just like slender dark-eyed whites with a little stumpy black
tail tip.  (In winter, anyway!)
 
Finally, we saw the first towering slabs of white, blue, and bottle
green ice on the horzon.  We had come to the land of the glaciers, where
nothing grows but lichens and ruffly fungi and fields of ice, eternally
ripe for harvest.
 
Waiting, waiting so patiently, but for all that never still.  It was late
morning, and we could hear the warming ice groaning and popping beneath
us where it reared up from the gray bedrock like a mammoth castle wall.
There were irregular white splashes of snow, and chunks of ice boulders
that the glacial face had heaved away from itself and onto the ground as
it warmed in the sun.  Rivulets of icy cold, cloudy water flowed from
beneath the ices' bulk.  The cloudiness was due to pulverized rock, so
finely ground by the sandy glacial bottom that it resembled baking flour,
as much as anything else.
 
On we flew, to a more stable spot, away from the face, to a place where
gently arcing ribbons of ice and snow converged, and seemed to form a
mighty river.  That was the spot we wanted!  Near enough the face to see
the magnificent view of the land, yet far enough not to have to worry
about the ice supporting us from beneath as the glacier yawned and
twisted and rubbed the sleep from its vast, layered face in the brilliant
morning sun.
 
Yes, that is where we landed, one by one, our shadows blue now, as
shadows on snow always are.  The snow here was not fluffy, it was more
granular, like coarse sugar, but we made do.  We each scratched a little
hollow into the snow to reduce our profile to the wind, which was
sometimes enough to practically turn our coats inside out like cheap
umbrellas!
 
Merlin, Dale, Wiz, Chip, Mac, and I lay curled up in our little hollows,
tail tip to nose, and enjoyed the spectacular views in every direction.
Somewhere, far below the ice, there was a towering mountain range, and we
could see some of it's peaks here and there.  Beautiful, beautiful!
 
Merlin started to talk about his passing very quietly, his breath
unrolling white, frozen streamers with every word.  He said that he had
had a good life, and a life with just enough years in it.  He said that
the passing was hard, only because it made him anxious as he was aware of
what was happening, but that it didn't hurt a bit.  And once he found the
warm, worn wooden boards of the Bridge beneath his paws, (The rainbow
goes over it, the Bridge is made of wood, and very simple!) he felt all
of the anxiety drain away, because he was home.  Forever home.
 
He talked about his Mommy Deb, and the others joined in with some funny
stories.(The one about the bathroom wastebasket made me laugh so hard my
eyes teared up and the tears darn near froze!)
 
The guys all wondered when they would see their Mommy again, and I had to
tell them that it would be a long, long someday from now.  Merlin sighed,
but said that this was o.k., only when *Mommy* came to visit, they were
going to take her to a tropical island, instead, because she had no fur!
 
Sandee
[Posted in FML issue 4488]