I arrive home from the local arts center, get out of my car, and a robin nearly flies into my head. Winged creatures are swooping from the apple trees to the hedge of lilacs that is just beginning to bud. My god, what a lovely day.

In my bag, I have an empty pint jar of water I’ve been drinking, and a ball of purple linen I’m knitting into a summer shift, and the books of the two authors whose reading I just attended — Helen Whybrow of The Salt Stones and Jody Gladding’s translation of Jean Giono’s The Serpent of Stars. I have a new book, too, a collection of stories by a Turkish author I’ve never read. Sitting with my book world friend, her publisher friend hands me a book, too. The afternoon and evening has gone this joyous way, like that hell-bent robin — strangers and friends and people I haven’t seen in ages — exuberant about literature and art and the unstoppable profusion of spring.

I like this art center so much I imagine curling up on a cushiony bench and sleeping beside the wide windows, the starlight on my face. An acquaintance I met at a Vermont Studio Center residency works here, too, and we plot some amusing possibilities. We’re beside the table heaped in lush mounds of delicacies, and I graze on stuffed mushrooms and empanadas and fresh tomatoes. I wrap lemon squares in napkins and hold these in my hands away from my books and knitting.

Outside on the stone patio, the wind is lifting over the meadow, the sun sinking and the cold creeping in. All around me looms that chilly darkness, the nearness of sunset, the hole in the night where dawn seems impossible. So much of my life I’ve teased and poked at this, and, conversely, pushed the vast cold away — through distraction and once-upon-a-time through drinking and work. Now, as the twilight drains away and night stakes in for its duration, I wander among the yet leafless apple trees, the garden with its green garlic nubs, drinking tea and listening to the birds settle down to sleep. My god, the myriad lessons of cancer. Note this, too: clench joy and fear in the same fist. See what happens.