A sort of fairy tale

As the moon approaches its first fullness of the new year, I have a little tale for you:

Once upon a time, a young woman dressed in a red hooded cloak started out on a journey through the wooded area behind her house. She packed a lunch: an apple, chicken salad, a bottle of water, and some potato crisps. The lunch was meant to keep her from being hungry, but not to add any additional weight to her journey either before she ate it or after. She laced up her most comfortable shoes, threw her lunch into a backpack with a couple of classic books, a purple velvet-covered journal, an ipod, a few gel pens, her computer, her library card, and her willpower. She started her journey skipping.

Once her lunch was eaten and the woods had reclaimed the heavy books and computer (these incidents, while seemingly fraught with disaster, were really small incidents when the young woman realized that she preferred a lighter load to the conveniences of the stated items), she walked through the dense foliage listening to her ipod and trying to make sense of the landscape. The moon appeared on the horizon.

So did the figure of a burly wolf. She wondered how a wolf could have made it to that part of the world, but quickly figured out that pondering the feasibility of his appearance would not help her survive him, so, armed only with a library card, a gel pen, and her willpower, she started the grueling process of outwitting the hairy creature. The moon was hardly two hours into the sky when she found that she had accomplished her task: wolves fancy themselves to be much more dangerous than they actually are, after all. Young women in red cloaks most often defeat them without the help of grandmothers, woodsmen, or even library cards.

Of course, hunger did come as the moon rose. The young woman decided that she had had her fill of forest romps and promptly left the woods forever. For it was in those woods, boys and girls, that the young woman found the many possible meanings of literary metaphors.

And, in leaving the very thing that had surrounded her for most of her life, she found something new. And new, after all, is worth pondering.

Happily ever after....? No way... Just a new story.