A few days before Christmas, 1992, I was awake in the middle of the night. Words were tumbling through my mind, and finally I got up and began writing them down. This may have been the first Christmas that Mum had been unable to spend with us in Bellevue. At any rate she was at a point where words tumbled over themselves in her own mind. In retrospect I think of this story, with its curious leaps from place to place and its half dozen or so new words may have come from empathy with her condition.
I have considered editing it to make it more "reasonable." How, for example can the knight have been "knee deep in buxom snow" when he was on horseback? And what does "buxom snow" mean anyway? Chest deep? And if it was chest deep, why was he only wading knee deep? But rather than worry about such matters, I've decided to leave it as I wrote it down that night.
In this version, I have added pictures, and a few notes on the cast of characters may be useful:
By the way, to move from place to place in the story, you will need to find the link within the picture at the bottom of each page.