Honeybear House

 One day we'll have a nice little house, deep in the valley of a frosty pine wood, where angels will dress the roofs with snow, their wings churning the clouds of a frozen sky.  It will be nestled in the mountains far away from the city, like a bear hibernating in a den made of honey.  We'll name it after him, we'll live like he does, solitary and warm in the hostile wild, where nothing will bother us except for the howling wind.  The seasons will shift ever so slightly, bringing rain and sun and fog, cycling through a wheel of orbit until the snow comes back again. 

The chimney will breathe a hearty smoke, as if the house were alive, protecting us from everything outside.  Every nook and cranny will be taken care of in return by our tidy hands, making sure the dust and clutter doesn't get too much.  That way the children will be able to play anywhere and make more messes for us to clean.  Their laughter will make music course through the halls, echoing like the fairy queens in an opera by Mozart.  The brick will be strong, the garden resilient.  We'll clean and cook and scent all the rooms with lavender and mint, a bouquet of soapy candles standing on altars of bliss.  

Our house will have a hearth with a log always burning.  On the coldest nights we'll sleep on the floor while the wood burns to ash as the hours go by.  As the embers fade our dreams will course through the ether, to realms inhabited by memories where the city had painted our souls with a scandalous brush.  The children won't know about them, this being their home, though sometimes you'll think it might be better for them if they could go to school and play with other kids back in the city.  And I'll say no, reminding you of how great it is here in our honeybear house, where everything we need is right in front of us, especially love, the most important one. 

You'll have a kitchen to make whatever your heart desires; a sturdy brick oven to bake cookies in; a roasting pit to cook what I've captured; a cauldron in the corner for making stew; an iron grill to make pancakes on- steaks, sir fry and salmon for special nights.  Everything will be in its right place.  You'll have a deep fryer for making chicken and fries; porcelain bowls for keeping pasta and salad in; a blender for your smoothies, the fruit coming in freshly grown off the orchard trees; an ice box for keeping ice cream; a refrigerator for keeping the garden vegetables fresh; a honey pot in the shape of a bear, not unlike Pooh of the Hundred-Acre-Wood, which will always remind you of ours when we read about it to our children before sleep; an array of pots and pans, tongs and other silver utensils hanging from the ceiling.  It will be a complete kitchen, something neither of us thought we'd ever have when living alone. 

We'll have an office with a fine mahogany desk, surrounded by a cylinder wall of leather-bound books.  It will have a reading sofa where we can read anything we've picked off the shelves.  This will also serve as our library, a temple of knowledge adrift on the sails of time.  We'll hang all the puzzles we've made in a special gallery, where you'll paint beautiful sunsets from our view of the valley.  Here you'll make more journals for me to write in, so that each of the years we spend together may be set in writings like this for our children to read, and our grandchildren, perhaps even a novelist seeking a happy conclusion to an otherwise strange family drama.  We'll waste away the years here; the seasons will pass slowly, for we will savor them all and not be stressed by the burdens of civilization. 

Our bed will have pillows filled with the softest feathers, and a blanket so white you'll mistake it for the snow outside.  We'll spend the most time here, snuggling together, bound to each other as two pods in a peanut.  Here we'll sleep our long peaceful nights, as owls hoot and coyotes howl, the strange sounds of the wild unsettling you at first.  But you'll get used to it, you always do.  You can get used to anything, even my lapses, for which I am forever grateful.  You're the best wife a man can have.  You deserve the best house, a honeybear house, built on the stuff that dreams unravel, constructed from materials that love has woven, passed on through the centuries in stories after the fold, erupted from a volcano that mortals explode into myth.