While you, of course, already know about the loom and the needle and the curse and the princess with the flaxen hair and azure eyes who slept motionless until awoken by true love’s kiss to rule the land alongside her beloved with fairness and justice ‘til the end of their days, you may not know about the intervening time, when the curse still lay over the land and all the fauna, from soaring eagles to slithering worms, fell into sympathetic somnolence with their princess fair, leaving the flora to run rampant over all human works, from grandest edifice to humblest hovel, with sinewy grape vines encircling the mighty castle’s highest towers, their leaves jealously hiding the keep’s stones from the warmth of the sun’s rays, and great towering oaks bursting through the parade grounds where once knights in gleaming armor competed for garlands made from the same roses whose thorny thickets now threatened pain and blood to any who might try to push past them and whose roots tunneled deep beneath the ramparts, before bursting forth to drink dry the murky moat, which was clogged with algae and muck as the catfish that had previously kept the waters clean dozed at the bottom, and whose blooms withered on their stems waiting for the loving kiss, that would never come, of pollinating bees who, droning dozily in their hives, jilted all their former lovers, leaving orchards barren and fields fallow, until even the very earth trembled in anticipation.
Peter Hanink is a college professor who lives in Long Beach, California.
I love that this is all one luscious sentence! Gorgeous!
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