The Winter Cabin Fantasy

I live in a big old rambling house on a gravel road far out into the countryside. Big. In fact my bedroom is so big that it's not hard to imagine it as an entire cabin from back in pioneer days.

And I find I do sometimes so imagine it, when I'm lying there in bed beneath the covers, beneath a couple of heavy wool blankets on a cold winter night. It's like I'm lying there in bed in an old log cabin, way back in the 1800s. I'm somehow indisposed, lying there covered with blankets.

And over where the chimney runs up through the bedroom on one side, there I imagine that a cast iron wood burning stove is attached to the chimney. A stove, fire burning, giving warmth in this old cabin.

And there's a woman cooking at the stove. And there are two children, a boy and a girl, playing in the cabin. And there's an old lady sitting in a rocking chair over on the far side of the stove. And often there's an old man sitting at the table -- seems he's perhaps a guest or a visitor. And this scene of down home domesticity plays itself out around me, around the edges, as I lie there in bed, fading in and out.

It's all vague and indistinct. I don't know where this cabin is, or what the scene is all about. I have no idea who these other people in the fantasy are. It's just a winter cabin fantasy that comes to me sometimes when I'm lying there beneath the blankets on a cold winter night.

I think more people have fleeting and drifting fantasies like this than you might imagine. But it's the kind of thing we ordinarily don't talk about.