3/26/24

Tuesday, March 26 

In bed  On the BL all night till 3:30 when I let Lilly out, but I didn't sleep particularly well and I'm awake but a bit tired as I type this with an aching left shoulder and right wrist and a shooting pain in my right elbow.  44°, high of 50°.   The wind is SSE at 21 mph, 7-21/39.  0.3 in of rain in the last 6 hours and 0.4" expected in the next 24.  Sunrise at 6:43, sunset at 7:11, 12+28.  Solar noon altitude will be 50°.

Pain, etc.   The pains on awakening are moderate but enough to keep me from falling back to sleep.  I let Lilly out again at 4:15, refreshed her water bowl, and strolled around the house, keeping my iPhone in my robe pocket 'just in case.'  I loaded the dishwasher at 4:45 after which my lower back was so tight and achy and my torso so stooped, I needed to sit down.

I'm grateful that I'm alive, but pretty grumpy about it because of the physical discomforts, what they steal in terms of joie de vivre, and what they require in terms of tending to.  I'm mindful of my good friend David Branch who died so young and of course of my mother, even younger.  I'm mindful of Kitty and of TSJ and of the millions who never lived to attain my age, and of others who could only dream of living in a home like ours in a neighborhood like ours, with good fortune like ours.  I'm mindful of Jane Kenyon and her poems that are a part of me, Otherwise and Woman, Why Are You Weeping? (India . . . has taken away the one who blessed and kept me) and Insomnia at Solstice ('The dog's wet nose appears / On the pillow, pressing lightly, / Decorously.  He needs to go out."), Trouble With Math in a One-Room Country School (". . . hardened my heart against authority. . .") and Depression in Winter:

There comes a little space between the south

side of a boulder

and the snow that fills the woods around it.

Sun heats the stone, reveals

a crescent of bare ground: brown ferns,

and tufts of needles like red hair,

acorns, a patch of moss, bright green…

.

I sank with every step up to my knees,

throwing myself forward with a violence

of effort, greedy for unhappiness

– until by accident I found the stone,

with its secret porch of heat and light,

where something small could luxuriate, then

turned back down my path, chastened and calm.

She died at age 47 of leukemia after years of suffering from depression.  I'm mindful too of Robert Frost's The Ovenbird ("The question it asks in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing.")