not heaven

One day when I was up at the shack with Grandad for hunting season, it started snowing heavily in the afternoon. I went outside and took a photo of the shack as the big fat wet clumps of flakes started falling. It snowed a lot and it was a thick damp snow. I was sure that the snow would show up in the photo, but later when I developed the film and made a print, I was a bit disappointed that it wasn't too obvious how heavily it was snowing in the photo. There was still some snow on the ground at that point from a previous heavy snow which had mostly melted. The snow kept coming and was eventually pretty deep. In the kitchen I found a can of Borden's condensed milk, of an unknown vintage, and decided to make some snow ice cream. I got a big mixing bowl and added some snow and poured in some condensed milk. The snow was still kind of wet and it just became sort of lumpy and slushy when I stirred it. I added some more snow but it didn't help too much, so I added some more milk which also didn't help too much. I think it just wasn't cold enough to get a sort of ice creamy texture that I'd hoped for. Eventually, I cleared some space on top of the old ice box which had been moved out onto the porch by then and set the snow ice cream bowl there to freeze overnight. I went back into the warm shack and forgot about my bowl of snow ice cream and enjoyed a nice dinner, loaded up the wood stoves and fell asleep in my sleeping bag. In the morning I went out to see how the ice cream was doing. Oddly, with a low thick cloud cover, it seemed to have gotten warmer overnight rather than colder as I expected. The snow outside was even more damp and melting. My snow ice cream had completely melted and in the middle floated a little furry lump. Overnight a mouse must have smelled the enticing smell of condensed milk and somehow jumped from the top of one of the old paint cans or the bird seed pot into the mixing bowl to find itself in a slushy heaven of snow ice cream. I hope it got to enjoy its fill of condensed milk slush before it realised it the sides of the mixing bowl were too steep and slippery to get out and the slush didn't provide a solid enough springboard to jump from. Or, I suppose the intended ice cream might have already been just diluted condensed milk when the mouse got into the bowl, in which case it would have immediately been in trouble and met its sad fate after swimming and scrambling to try to get up the sides of the bowl, eventually succumbing to the cold in the wet or perhaps drowning when exhausted. I was a bit disappointed that my attempt at snow ice cream was a failure, if not due to the mouse then due to the unseasonably warm night. When I had taken the mouse out of the milky liquid, I set it down on the table on the porch. It had stiffened in the posture of the mouse equivalent of a dead man's float so it sat upright balanced on its stiff hind legs and tail. It seemed an odd and serendipitous natural taxidermy of the poor creature in a curious or perhaps aggressive stance and I thought I would memorialize the moment with a photograph which I present below.