Specimens, Days

A weekend spent outdoors, mushing two days from the yard on Stampede & then skiing a seven-mile loop from my front door in the Village. & in the meantime, playing music with good friends, cooking some fine meals, & generally finding myself fulfilled from one moment to the next. I’ll be brief in saying so, but given the pending holiday & my pending trip down to Texas for a week, I’ll say only that I am unspeakably grateful to be alive & to inhabit this life among all the others I could have lived. Happy Thanksgiving, friends & family alike. Whether or not I ever find time to articulate it, those that I love are a constant company to my thinking & living & being. Also, a few new flickr pictures & the mushing blog goes forward too.

I am looking at this curious photograph of a 94-year old great-grandmother holding an eleven pound premature baby who spent the first four months of his life in the hospital & who still requires quarantine due to the fragility of his lungs. & though I know the child’s parents, he is a stranger to me, as is the frail old woman. & her eyes regard the child with a tenderness that seems to speak in years, while his own fawn over distances making shapes & conjuring the world into the familiar. What life will he lead? & then, towards its end, palsied, fragile all over again, what child will he hold in his shaking hands? & where, I wonder, always, where does that living go, that meaning that seems to call from us with such blazing intensity? All of these days fugitive & irretrievable, & then as we age our fingers seem to clutch tighter those things that intimate our own mortality. A child’s eye full of vitality. The wild countenance of a threatened moose buckin