The fireplace is going crackle, crackle, crackle, and when I look into it, I amuse myself by thinking up ways to describe the flames.

They leap. They dance. The flicker. They flare. They lick the logs. They lull me into my mood for today’s column.

Lazy.

It is so nice and warm in here. No doubt, those pretty flames are consuming the oxygen that my brain needs to function. Being oxygen-deprived, I have a perfect excuse to be ineffectual. I am, today, as useless as an ornament on last month’s Christmas tree. One that doesn’t light up or flicker or pulse or feed starving children or bake bread or remove calluses or alleviate any of the world’s financial woes.

That’s me (it would be “I,” if I had the strength to be grammatically correct, which I don’t.)

I am a holiday ornament, on vacation from being meaningful, relevant, insightful, inspiring, or thought-provoking on this lovely, lyrical, lollygagging, languorous day.

I did do something purposeful, though.

I made Vanilla tea with lots of chemical sweeteners and a dear little tag that hangs over the side of the cup like a flag, waving, “Hey, there. Open a novel, wrap an Afghan around your knees, snuggle on the sofa, hug your ferret, and drink me.”

A ferret is a perfect pet for a useless writer on a lollygagging winter day, because a ferret doesn’t DO anything. You can drop a morsel of food three inches from its mouth, and it won’t find it unless you point the ferret’s nose at the dish. It can scamper out your front door, and even if it were no more than two feet away, unless you picked it up and carried it back into the house, it would never find its way back. It can never go for a walk. Nope. Never. Absolutely impossible. If you put a harness on a ferret, which is like trying to put a silk sock on a slinky, instead of moving forward, it will take you for a zigzag. Advance three steps. Stop. Dig in the grass. Retreat four steps. Stop. Scramble up your pants leg. Scramble down. Stop. Chase its tail. Stop. Raise its head. Begin to run frantically as if being chased by nothing-in-particular. Stop. Climb back up your pants leg.

Some ferrets, like mine, will come if you ring a bell. Others just look at you with quizzical expressions on their faces that convey the thought, “Are you food?”

What ferrets do most, best, and infallibly, however, is make their owners laugh.

So, laughing is one more thing that I have been doing on this idle, idyllic, inert, and immobile day.

Yesterday, anticipatory to writing a column about how the philosophies of great thinkers can be applied to the problems of today, I extracted Volume I – “Aristotle” – from a shelf containing the Great Books of the Western World. And I can guarantee you that when I sat down in my green swivel armchair with the book on my lap, my brain was wide awake and functioning. I had even brought along a spiral legal pad and an erasable pen so that I could take notes.

Sadly, however, the lethargy that I am feeling today must have been in its incipient stages, because as soon as I got to the sentence “If genera are different and co-ordinate, their differentiae are themselves different in kind,” my eyelids became heavy, my eyes drifted toward the fireplace, and my brain turned to goo.

Other than watching flames flickering in my fireplace on this lazy, hazy, down-zi-daisy, dillydally day, I went to an antique store earlier this morning, and bought a vintage copy of The Secret Garaden (for a friend), a glass flower “frog” for my ball point pens, a butter dish to hold coins, safety pins and paperclips, a newspaper (which I forgot at the restaurant where I had lunch), and a bottle of Rolaids anticipatory to eating all of the wrong things for dinner.

My dinner menu is: Chocolate kisses. Peanuts. Oatmeal cookies. Hot chocolate. Whipped cream. Tea. A fireplace. A ferret. And a book.

Wishing all of you dear readers a belated but very Happy New Year.

Life is good.

Copyright © Shelly Reuben, 2025. Shelly Reuben’s books have been nominated for Edgar, Prometheus, and Falcon awards. For more about her writing, vibasit www.shellyreuben.com.