I stand outside the town office building, eating leftover beet-carrot-garlic salad for lunch, watching the sky alternately break apart in sun or drop rain. If there’s a rainbow, it eludes me. A retired couple who lives up the street walks by, returning from their daily post office walk. We kick around the news: a petition to close the town’s elementary school and how last night’s snow turned to rain.

Slushy, slushy.

The wind kicks up a hint-of-late-February warmth, the way that month can smell of thawing earth, of the gradual thaw-and-freeze-and-thaw that morphs into spring. Midwinter here, the weather out of whack. The afternoon opens into sunlight. The sun’s rare January appearance carries me through the afternoon and into a cheerily ebullient Selectboard meeting, and home again along an icy road, the stars glittering over hayfields, to play cards with my daughter while the cats savor their feline leisure, sprawled before the wood stove.

I lay awake late reading Claire Dederer’s Monsters. Dederer writes:

… the genius is not you. Not me. The genius, as we understand it, is not the person who spends most of her time, and I mean that quite literally, thinking about childcare. My major artistic concern for the past twenty years has been childcare, it has preoccupied me more than any other subject; even now that my children are mostly grown I’m still not sure I managed it well, I lie awake worrying about it, and meanwhile old Pablo was putting out cigarettes on his girlfriend’s face.