The universe gives you a snow day.  Although you don't have to teach (it's your work-from-home-day, after all), the thought of classes being canceled gives you permission to throw your carefully scripted plans out the window.  No need to be at a desk today. Your kitchen is calling you.  

You make soup, so much soup and pots of pinto and garbanzo beans until your home smells like comfort and your freezer is stockpiled with spoonfuls of love for those days when you won't have energy to conure it yourself.  You even pickle green beans to the backdrop of Spanish guitar music and once naked tree branches dusted with tiny white pearls outside your window.  It is as if the crystal blanket across the city has given you permission to care for yourself.  

That night, you sleep under the soft kisses of snowflakes and awaken once again to a city cleansed of its busyness by ten inches of snow.  

You venture out into that wilderness armed only with a strong cup of coffee and hiking boots, past iced-over streets and neighbors shoveling their sidewalks in their bathrobes and snowshoes, towards your neighborhood park looking like nothing if not an open prairie.  The scent of winter and cedar burning fireplaces fills the air, as does the stillness interrupted only by the chatter of birds oblivious to the snow piled atop their homes. 

In a few hours, this quiet expanse will be taken up by kids rolling together snowmen and falling back to etch snow angels into the earth.  But for now, it is just you and a lone cross-country skier in this vast morning.

You cannot help yourself: you cut across the safer street paths where your feet can land between car grooves and into the unblemished snowfall of the park, though you know it will take you calf-deep into the snow and your shoes and socks will soak through. No matter. You are on your way to a blazing fire and hearty breakfast with your family--and what is a snow day for if not plunging into nature headlong?

Later, after the snow is nothing more than a memory and puddles under the sun, you still soak up the gift of your snow day as you soak in a bath piled high with bubbles as fluffy as the snow you trekked through this morning.  For a day--two, really--the snow stopped time, allowing you to tune in to what really matters: early morning walks and luxurious family breakfasts, lazy schedule-less days and long naps.

The universe gave you a soul day.