In the early morning, I drive over the crest of Walden Heights into the rising sunlight that’s pink on the freshly fallen snow. Every late autumn, winter’s imminence lies in me — the dread of inarguable cold and shortened days, how my heavy boots clomp. I no longer read outside. And every year, the stellar beauty of this season astounds me.

Over coffee and raspberry jam, we talk writing and disease. My companion reminds me that a writer does not fix the world. A writer writes. By the time we part, the morning gleams a bluebird sky. When I wrote Unstitched, I followed a trail of stories about addiction, person to person, sometimes to frightening places, sometimes to people who amazed me with resiliency and courage. Likewise, this cancer that inhabited me and maybe yet does has both constricted and widened my world. A year after diagnosis, as my breakfast companion noted, is both terrifying and awesome. I’m keenly aware of the limits of my bones jointed together with tendon and muscle and flesh, and that my will which propels this body is mortal and fierce. This, too, that writing mirrors a tenor of that same blind faith, that creative work will wind its way to a reader in need, while salvaging my own limping soul.

At the other end of this day, blue twilight. As the night’s cold falls, the village lights switch on. In my thin coat, I note my longstanding neglect about mittens, my fists jammed in my pockets. Nonetheless, I keep walking, seduced by the beauty of the running river, its edges icing, the sky overhead an infinity.

Here,
I’m here—
The snow falling ~ Issa