Start again…

Twenty years ago, I wandered on an early morning walk. Mightily pregnant, I didn’t go far, merely down to our sugarhouse and through the white pines. I looped back through the garden. I was about to have a second baby — that very day — and, second time around, I knew those solitary walks would — for an undetermined time — be a distant memory.

In a break in the rainy weather, a friend walks me through the cemetery, past the little league field, and down the hill into town. At Front Seat Coffee, she buys cookies, and we sit in the courtyard, eating and talking, the courtyard where I’ve passed so many hours with my laptop. Slowly, we walk back up the hill. Three robins perch on the elementary school’s fence.

Six weeks ago, another friend walked me to the Galaxy Bookshop, the first walk I’d taken to town since last November. I picked up a copy of Dostoyevsky at the Galaxy, and finished the novel in Dartmouth, waiting for surgery. The surgeons teased me, Why such light reading?

One more lesson from cancer: how intensified the world becomes. Slip back, start again. Repeat, repeat. But isn’t that one way of the world? There’s plenty more ways — a crash, a sudden halt, a perilous nonstop descent — but often our lives are fits and starts.

I remind myself, Try to learn something.

This day dawns overcast, broody with the promise of rain, the world lush with spring green and birdsong. To keep myself and my cats happy, I light a fire in my stove, brew coffee, consider the day. As I recover, my old demons of uncertainty have woken, too. My walking companion counseled me to narrow my energy to the actual day. Help was recently sent fortuitously to me; this morning, as I mixed powdered sugar and butter for cake frosting, I reminded myself, Be grateful; use your luck wisely. Savor this day.

At Twenty-Eight

By Amy Fleury

It seems I get by on more luck than sense,

not the kind brought on by knuckle to wood,

breath on dice, or pennies found in the mud.

I shimmy and slip by on pure fool chance.

At turns charmed and cursed, a girl knows romance

as coffee, red wine, and books; solitude

she counts as daylight virtue and muted

evenings, the inventory of absence.

But this is no sorry spinster story,

just the way days string together a life.

Sometimes I eat soup right out of the pan.

Sometimes I don’t care if I will marry.

I dance in my kitchen on Friday nights,

singing like only a lucky girl can.