![]() ![]() New Year’s Day view from the kitchen table. ![]() But I wrote anyway, if only to prove I was still made of moving parts (albeit unstrung by grief and illness): On my worst return – from month-long pneumonia that happened after the loss of a beloved friend – I believed myself finished. It is always painful laboured stuff, as with the burning first walk nurses make one do after abdominal surgery, or the deep necessary breaths after a chest infection to force fresh air into the swampy lung bottoms. Sit then with blank page and pen to simply describe the view from a window. Pinch my cheeks and bite my lips to bring my colour back. It seems impossible I will recover my appetite for food, life, laughter. There is a lump in my throat, a stone in my stomach. My place in the nature of things is lost, forgotten. The world, whatever the season, has a layer of frost over it, and I am frozen out. Specimen Days, Walt WhitmanĪfter each hard and slow return to the world I’ve had to make after serious illness, I turn always on my first days back up (as again now, after ten days with Covid-19 symptoms) to a few trusted rites and rituals. ![]() ![]() Dear soothing, healthy, restoration-hours––after three confining years of paralysis––after the long strain of the war, and its wounds, and death. ![]()
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