Each One’s Comfort Depending on the Other

Scraping a hide

I lay in the night listening to the wind and thinking that I should probably figure out what to do with the rest of my life. The wind was what had wakened me, gusting 30 mph or more, that thrumming rush of air, and the temperature had fallen to 15 below, and then there’s Penny with her confounded insistence on sleeping beneath a partially-opened window. I thought of closing it, but knew that would only wake her, and while I am generally the more selfish of the two of us, this does not preclude enduring minor suffering on her behalf, so I pulled the covers to my lower lip and allowed fretting over my future to usurp the small discomfort caused by the flow of frigid air across our bedroom.

It took me about a dozen minutes to determine that my future is no more or less certain than it was before the cold had pulled me from slumber, which is not to say that it’s particularly certain, but then again, it’s a degree of certainty (or lack thereof) I’ve lived with for nearly all my adult life, so why worry now? Still, I was not yet warm enough to recommence drooling into my pillow, so I started thinking about this story and what it says about our culture and these times.

And then, because at 2:15 (I knew the time because I’d descended to the clock-equipped kitchen to stoke the wood stove, and yes, I recognized well enough the folly of feeding the fire while my wife dozed under an open window), I was not of mind to fully grasp the implications, I thought of the piglets down in their shed. I’d taken them another bale of bedding hay just before we turned in – their eyes glinted in the beam of my headlamp, and they stood and leaned toward me expectantly – and I knew they’d nested deep for the night, each one’s comfort depending on the other.

There was something about the image I held of the pigs in their hay, coupled with that thought, indeed, that very phrase – each one’s comfort depending on the other – that slowed my mind. I could actually feel my thoughts decelerating. Softening.

I soon fell back to sleep.