~ ~ ~
One Sunday morning, I told Mom that I was going out to play.
“Think before you speak up! Who plays outside in such weather? Look!”
The scudding shoots of rime snow scratch-and-scraped the murky dusk outside the panes in the kitchen window.
“See this mayhem?”
But I croaked and grumbled and never got off her back until Mom grew angry and told me to go wherever I wished.
I went out into the boundless Courtyard. No one at all, the desolate space around looked so too gloomy to stay in. Turning my face away from the snappy slaps from the wild snow torrents, I bypassed the house corner and crossed the road to the field next to the nailed up garbage enclosure. There also was nobody except for me, but I couldn’t see myself. All I could see was the outright turmoil full of violent blizzard lashing the dull gray world by the serpent-like belt of prickly snow. I felt lonely and wished I were back home. But Mom would say, “So I told you!”, and the younger would start giggling.
Then from the far edge of the field where long-long ago they played volleyball and gorodki in summer, there came a voice of the aluminum loudspeaker on top of a wooden post not seen thru so hurly-burly weather, “Dear children! Today we’ll learn the song about Merry Drummer. Listen to it first.” And a well-trained quire of children's voices began to sing of a clear morning at the gate, and the maple drumsticks in the hands of Merry Drummer.
The song was over and the announcer commenced to dictate the lyrics so that the listeners by their radios would write it down word for word, “Get up ear-ly, get up ear-ly, get up ear-ly, with the first light of the mor-ning by the gate…”
And I already was not alone in the grim world getting belted. I waded thru the snowdrifts but the snow could not get to me because of my thick pants pulled tightly over my felt boots. The announcer finished dictating the first verse, and let me listen to it sung by the quire. Then he dictated the second, also with the subsequent singing thru it, and the third.
“Now, listen to the whole song, please.”
And there gathered quite a lot of us—both Merry Drummer, and the children with their merry voices, and even the blizzard turned into one of us and wandered by my side across the field, hither and thither. Only that I kept falling thru the crust into the sifted powder snow under it, and the blizzard danced above, scattering its prickly pellets.
When I got home Mom asked, “Well, seen anyone there?”
I said “no” but no one laughed.
~ ~ ~
The solitary walk in the big company, under the dictation about Merry Drummer, laid me up in bed with the temperature. It was strangely quiet all around with everyone gone to work and to school.