Ladybug and heart quote on a forearm

The snow came over the pass on Tuesday and the hut has been shut ever since, so I have had time to count the stones in the back wall. There are two hundred and eleven. Gwen says I should stop counting and start shovelling, but she is the one who sleeps through the wind, so I don't listen to her much.

Yesterday I found a ladybug in a crack behind the stove, curled up tight like a fist. Somebody must have carried it up in a rucksack in September and forgotten it was there. I thought it was dead until I breathed on it and one leg moved, slow as a clock. I've put it in an empty cocoa tin with a bit of moss, and I've been checking on it every hour the way you used to check on me when I had the croup.

Gwen says they gather in cracks to sleep out the winter and wake when the thaw comes. I told her you'd like that, because you always said the good things hide where nobody looks. She laughed and said it was the most sentimental thing she had heard from a man who mends avalanche beacons for a living.

The road should open by Thursday. I'll bring the tin home and let it out on the front step, and you can tell me what it was thinking all winter. Tell Dad the sheep in the lower field are his problem now. Love you to the moon and back, which is further than the pass, I checked.