Appropriated Jacket

It’s been not too terribly cold but snowy and rainy and sleety here.   I’m not sure if, “sleety” is a word, but since autocorrect didn’t try and change it three times into a similar but different word, I’m going with it.

Two nights ago we had some snow in the few hours before dawn.   We discovered our dog was mad for the cold weather and snow and that all the children close to our house like to come into our house, pile their wet clothes in front of our fireplace and play inside until they were ready to go back out into the damp mess.

I say “mess” because it wasn’t a very fun snow for more than a few hours.   The warm weather coupled with the intermittent rain and sleet made things look more like snow than they really were.   This morning patches were melted and all the vegetation had grown so heavy with waterlogged snow they’d shed their white coverings in large chunks.

But children are attracted to anything cold and white, especially when it calls for cancellation of schools, so they went back out to play.   My husband took all the children on a hike in the woods with strict warnings against getting anywhere near, or even thinking about the creek as an option for any of their body parts to touch.

Our dog, officially a cold-weather lover with no need to warm her paws or dry her fur, followed along happily bounding in and out of the crunchy, chunky snow while new snowfall fell.   Temperatures stayed a few degrees above freezing, making the weather look nice but not feel too cold.

I was in and out of the house a good bit over the extended weekend’s weather.   I’ve been wearing a jacket I appropriated and claimed as mine.   I got it from our front coat closet.   It’s light in weight but warm in function.   It has a hood and it’s a bit larger than my size which accommodates anything wintery and bulky I might be wearing.

We don’t know who the jacket belonged to.   We tried to find the owner, but by the time we’d discovered we had an extra jacket in our coat closet it was the summer months and we had no way of knowing when the jacket was left.  We left the jacket in place, hoping someone would come over and discover this was the house they’d left that jacket in ten months ago and boy what a nice surprise to find it had been here all along.   But no one claimed it.

Before my brother-in-law’s wedding we made space in the coat closet for guests that might bring a jacket.   It was then that I decided to try the jacket on and decided I liked it enough to have bought it myself had I been looking for one.

So it’s mine now.   Unless it’s yours.   If it is, you can have it back.   You’ve got good taste.

The Big Boy Update:   Tomorrow my son will be eight.   School is cancelled due to weather.   He’s pretty happy about it.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and I played a game she got for her birthday.   There is a vertical map and each player sits on one side of the map, not able to see what’s on the opponent’s side.   Your piece is magnetically connected to the piece on the opposite side of the map.   You have to work together to navigate through a maze—which is different on both sides.   This is all good and fun if you can see.   So we modified the board.   We made a tactile version  so she could feel all the paths in the maze and used stickers to mark the treasure spots.   She could play the game easily once she could feel what was happening.   She loved moving the pieces around the board, knowing the piece on the other side was moving too.