I call the mechanic back about my car who says it’s all good news, a replaced muffler, and the car looks fine.

Finally. Something repaired in the chain of a dying range, a done-in washing machine, my own washed-out and piss-poor attitude.

In one of the few sunny days I’ve seen recently, I’m standing on my back porch, listening to water dripping. We talk a little about the shitstorm of this decade so far, the election roaring up in nearby New Hampshire. He mentions he doesn’t know my political leanings, and I laugh. I’ve been writing him checks for years now, and I’m certain it’s no surprise who I didn’t vote for. But he bends our conversation a little further, kicking the standard gloom-and-doom away and remarks that we might as salvage some happiness in this life.

On this rainy midwinter day, I convince my youngest to drive north to a library in search of a Claire Dederer book. Here’s a few lines from the last chapter of Monsters.

Love is anarchy. Love is chaos. We don’t love the deserving; we love flawed and imperfect human beings, in an emotional logic that belongs to an entirely different weather system than the chilly climate of reason….