I’ve written about the strange and often terrifying world of cancer here over the past few months. In the past week, my eyelashes have thinned. At first, my eyelashes looked as though I had walked through a rainstorm. I’m not at all adverse to rain and lousy about remembering a jacket, so I often end up in a deluge. Last July, I explored trails on a friend’s property. Over the past years, she’d designed and cut narrow trails. I walked through what seemed like enchanting forests of moss, stands of cedar so dense the light darkened, around a former beaver pond filled in as swamp, and finally discovered great white pines. She had unearthed pieces of white quartz and marked the edges of the trail. Walking back, rain fell, hard. By the time I reached my Subaru, I was drenched. I wiped my face on a sweater I’d left on the passenger seat. In the rearview mirror, my eyelashes held crystals of raindrops, diminutive pieces of that forest’s quartz.
January, temperature hovering around ten degrees, rainfall is in no immediate forecast.
As an andidote to the national clamor, here’s a few lines poet Marie Howe wrote for her brother from “What the Living Do.”
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled upwaiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours throughthe open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do….
Stony Soil Vermont 
Oh those quartz-like crystals on your eyelashes. What an image.
How we keep living: I needed that passage. Plumbing issue upstairs, woodstove on constant alert, frost on the glass, ass-hattery in DC. Hugs.
Oh, the extra challenges of winter!
Great poem! Thanks Brett!
Thank you! I love this one, too.
I was thinking about Li Po and the art of living and writing in crazy times. He repeated found beauty in the mundane, built huts in snowy bamboo forests, and lamented the insanity of leaders. Yet, he seemed to take refuge in friends, the beauty of the world, writing poems, and doing the toils of the everyday. He loved to walk and to sit by the river. He adored snow. I think the two of you would have hit it off marvelously.
I just finished History of the Rain which was funny and moving, and the best novel about literature as a balm for life threatening illness I have ever read.
(An aside: I made a typo. The Trails of Tears were 200 years ago.)
I’ll have to look up The History of the Rain. Thanks!
History of the rain by Niall Williams
Such powerful and true words (yours and the poem).
🩵
I’d rather deal with these small daily nuisances than watch the news these days.
Agreed….
I’m sure my elderly mother would appreciate doing any these nuisances now in her incapacitated state.