SAFE AND WARM

It's been raining for hours. The rain fingers have coaxed some incredible music from the rain piano. Like Mae Sarton, on this day in 1982, I've learned to "float instead of struggling against intolerable pressures." The rain helps me visualize myself riding the waves of November and not tumbling under them. She also declares the mystery "that suddenly opens the door into poetry. A face, a voice, two hours of rich communion and the world (is) changed. I am back to my real life again." She adds, "Seventy feels very young." I can't go quite that far as the rain has made my joints hurt a bit. Rain has a way of reminding me of grief. I think about my loved ones moving on and wonder how I can possibly catch up to them. It will require divine intervention. When they come for me will they fill me with clues and keys then hurry away leaving me to my journey? Or will they gather me to themselves and hasten me forward along paths already familiar to them? Is it possible that we will be as strangers? No! that would be too cruel. Cedar has arrived to spend the day. It's her day off from K. After breakfast she wanted a fire so one was quickly provided. We left the stove door open and watched the fire spread. She saw tiny people chasing tiny deer. I saw faces smiling out at us. Thoreau wrote about abandoning the fireplace for a stove. It was more economical wood-wise. But "it concealed the fire and (he) felt as if (he) had lost a companion." So with our fire in the stove and our box of warmth around us we have created a bit of summer in November. The rain roars on the sturdy roof trying to beat it's way inside then, running down, splashes into the muddy earth beneath the eaves. So we are safe and warm today.
I have begun reading EM Forester's "Howard's End".
I skipped through Tennessee Williams. His was a tragic life and ended with him self-medicated in his bed... a bottle cap wedged in his throat.