My daughter drives me to the high school where a few cars are parked, likely basketball players getting in a few extra workouts. We walk for a slow bit on the sidewalk and then drive north, up along the Black River towards Eligo Lake. At the boat launch, she turns off. We sit. Someone’s been out on the ice.

We are in the in-between season, neither Christmas nor New Year’s, 2024 finally spun down to nearly nothing, a whole new year, beginning with that wintry January looming large.

I am in the in-between season, too. Were it not for antibiotics and chemo, I would have passed from this world, or surely be heading that way. I am in the holding season, enduring, enduring, the chemo (and I’ll admit how terrifying chemo is, crimson red, fluorescent orange) destroying the lymphoma, draining my strength — and yet I’m still me, mellowed in many ways, stripped of patience with foolishness in other ways.

The December this daughter was two, snow fell every day. In January, the snow kept falling. The garden fence, the sugarhouse, the driveway and road, vanished in windswept white. This was before the age of internet. I stirred batch after batch of homemade play-doh. She had a doll stroller with a striped seat and pushed her babies around the house. Outside, I pulled her on a sled though the woods We looked for tracks, caught perfect snowflakes on our mittens. That winter seemed eternal, too, but it was not.

In the cancer world, or not, we’re always in the in-between season, life ebbing and rising, children growing, the snow pillowy but for a moment before settling to ice, washing away in rain.

Everything Is Made Of Labor
Farnaz Fatemi

The inchworm’s trajectory:
pulse of impulse. The worm
is tender. It won’t live
long. Its green glows.
It found a place to go.
Arrange us with meaning,
the words plead. Find the thread
through the dark.