A friend inquires if my summer’s adrenaline, the post-chemo and post-surgery and cancer-remission wave of energy has waned, and, indeed, that has, the winter and cold and what’s called fatigue but is actually a lifeless bleak plain setting up quarters in my household.

Winter is a reckoning time. In a strange kind of way I begin to see the pieces of my life jostle into a pattern — childhood and college years and those years in my twenties when I ran back and forth across the country and then to northern Vermont, how I built a marriage and house, the young mothering years of children and friends, how we taught ourselves to sugar and run a business and I taught myself to write. Then I broke that life apart and took the children, created a new life, kept writing books, learned to view the world askance to keep danger from our door. Danger slunk in anyway. The world, indeed, is cause and effect, not a linear straight-shot but a dense sphere. Surely the human story is the same for you and me, with its endlessly profound and terrible and awesome variations.

This morning, the harsh cold has relented, just the slightest, snow sifting down, the blue dawn pushing away the night’s darkness.

I’m encouraged to seek “protective factors” which I glean as my daughters’ merriment, a purring cat on my chest as a I read by the woodstove, a walk with a friend on a snowy road. My heart longs for the season of those #10 Pond swims, with friends or without, the sun hot on my bare knees. Spectator to the loon world. Not iced coffee but hot coffee. Now, these days of small light. In a considered burst of optimism, I mail a carpenter a check in a card with snowy evergreens and seal our agreement. Come when the weather splits and put two more windows in my house. Open the view of the valley and the village. Another plot point.

What would people look like

if we could see them as they are,

soaked in honey, stung and swollen,

reckless, pinned against time? — Ellen Bass