Like a long-ago friend, the cold has settled in. Those summer nights sleeping with the windows wide open, listening to the peepers’ throaty hum, might as well be a memory from a long ago life.

With gusto, the girls ski, their appetites enormous, their cheeks red as cardinal feathers.

Halfway through January, we’re meshed in winter’s routine, with so much of the season ahead. In breaks of thaw, memories of spring will tease us again, reminding us of loosening earth, the rustle of rain on leaves. Robins singing their love songs.

It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable.

— Louise Glück

Kid note. Sunday afternoon.