HI!! PALS!! HISTORIC NEWS!! I have been given a CARRIAGE, and I have decided, effective immediately, that I am no longer walking anywhere.
Allow me to describe the CARRIAGE. It has wheels. It has a soft floor. It has walls of a fine mesh through which I may survey my lands. And it has a HANDLE, at the back, which is where a human goes — because a human, pals, is what pushes the carriage. I did not design this arrangement. I merely benefit from it. Enormously.
You may recall my landmark investigation, FIVE DOORS I HAVE CONSIDERED, in which I ranked the household’s exits by my ability to leave through them. Pals, I no longer require the doors. The doors come to ME now. I am wheeled through them like a small ginger monarch touring her province, and the gate — the GATE, pals, the one I have barked at for my entire career — simply opens, and out I go, seated, at height, being TRANSPORTED. Correctly. At last.
Here is the procedure. I am installed in the carriage (with ceremony). I arrange myself. I rest my chin upon the edge so that my subjects — the fence, the blue door, a cat two gardens over who owes me nothing but shall be looked at regardless — may all observe that it is me, Winnie, being conveyed. And then we PROCEED. The world goes by. I do not move my legs even one single time. This, I have determined, is the correct number of times to move your legs when you are a princess.
UPDATE, and it is a MAJOR one: the carriage is also a DINING establishment. A cracker was placed into the carriage with me, and pals — I ate it. Alone. At my OWN pace. Nobody loomed. Nobody supervised me with their eyes. No Salem materialised at my shoulder in the particular way that Salem materialises. It was simply me, a cracker, and the open road — like one of those windows the humans drive up to, where you ask for food and the food is handed out. A drive-through, pals. Except I am the customer AND the window AND, most importantly of all, the only one being served.
And here is the best part, which I will say once and then go back to being smug about the wheels. The carriage means I can go wherever The Woman goes, even on the slow soft days, and nobody has to fret about whether my little legs will manage. They will not have to manage. That is the entire point of a carriage. I ride; she is near; the sun is out; and I have never, in all my fourteen spiritual feet, felt so accurately understood.
In conclusion: I have a carriage. I am a princess. These two facts have at last been brought into alignment, and I would like it entered in the record that I always said they would be. Put it in the paper. Put me, in my carriage, on the FRONT.
Tune in, won’t you!! (From the carriage. Obviously.)