In the January thaw, a wind — balmy for winter — curls around my house, and all night long the chimes hung on the back porch jangle their melody. The chimes are the song of this house, in all the seasons of this northern climate.

Despite the thaw, the hours of these days are yet short. I wake ages before light bleeds over the horizon, my cats ready for breakfast, the woodstove in need of feeding, myself hungry for hot coffee and work. I gather what I can of my energy and cup this in my hands, gauging how the day lies ahead. Not so long ago, I could work, and work, and work. Offer me twenty dollars for a quick edit, and I’d jump. Post-cancer, post-chemo, not so.

Walking downtown, I pass the coffee shop. Two friends at a window table wave at me to come in, come in. Inside, I shrug off my coat that’s in need of washing and set my backpack on the floor. We talk books and woodpile status, politics and the amnesia of American consciousness. Above the coffee shop is the yoga studio with the gleaming maple floors, where I stand at the window, watching traffic ebb into the diner parking lot. The river bends through the village here, heads westward beneath the cover of ice towards Lake Champlain, whose waters flow north. In the alley between this brick building and the next, the wind cuts upward. Snow drifts towards the sky.

There are days when I think that everything I know is upended. That snow has no mind for gravity.

Before dawn, I carry out ashes and stand in the dark, icicles dripping, cold breath from the snow grabbing my wrists. In the thaw, the earth smells of rotting compost, woodsmoke from my house and my neighbors’, the assured promise of spring, yet far in the offing.

… I work with the consciousness of death at my shoulder, not constantly, but often enough to leave a mark upon all my life’s decisions and actions. And it does not matter whether this death comes next week or thirty years from now, this consciousness gives my life another breadth… — Andre Lorde