This Night

Oh life and it just keeps going until it doesn't and that sliver of a moon whose picture I took so recently has swelled again, deep belly-full, almost truly full. It hangs silver in the dark black sky, one star above it shining like it's little sister.

As soon as I wrote that post about the wind and the pewter this afternoon it all changed. Suddenly and without fanfare, all of the sky cleared and turned brilliant-winter blue and every trace of cloud was gone, blown away or wiped away, like those magic slates we used to have, one pull up on the plastic, all clean again.

Changing and changing is the ever-constant of it all.

I wrote this morning and then deleted about my dog Buster puking on the rug and I was complaining about it and tonight he is not well. I don't know what's wrong with him. Lately he has been acting so old and his cataracts shine like road-played marbles. He doesn't seem to want to move tonight and I had to take him into the house. He was lying on a chair on the porch in the cold and he made his way slowly into the den where he eventually and slowly got up onto Mr. Moon's chair.
Damn. Animals. Damn.
We just spent over three hundred dollars today on Zeke going to the vet for his TEETH and his itching and damn. All I do is complain about these dogs and then they get old or sick or old and sick and change...
Change.

I am cooking chicken (I am such a hypocrite) and all sorts of vegetables and olives in a red sauce and bread is rising and Mr. Moon is just getting in from the woods and salad is picked and rinsed and waiting in the refrigerator and cooking never seems to change. Same pans, same knives, same ingredients in rotation but the movements I make in the kitchen seem always to be the same. Reaching for this skillet, the cutting board, slicing, chopping, sauteing, simmering, steaming, mixing, kneading. Turn on the flame, turn it down, check the bread's progress, stir the sauce.
It is a sort of constancy that I love. Set the table, bring out the butter, the salt, the hot sauce, the glasses of water.

This is life. This is life. Constancy and change. I told Owen today that his Bop and I were going to Mexico and we were going to get into the ocean and look at fishes just like the ones we were looking at in the salt-water tank at the restaurant where we were having lunch. "Stop," he said, and put his hand up to my mouth. "No."
"Yes," I said, "We are," and I told Lily about it and she said, "He is going to miss you so much," and I said, "And we will miss him too but sometimes, you have to go away together, you and your man."
"I know," she said. But I am not sure she does. I doubt she remembers when her father and I first went away to Cozumel but as we packed, she kept putting her toothbrush in my suitcase. She probably remembers in her bones, missing us.
But we always come back.
Better than we were before.
Always. And if going away together is what keeps us together and fills us up with something magical, then we are not only doing for ourselves, but for our family too.

The weather changes, the wind blows in this air and that, the world turns and turns and turns but in the same patterns, the moon rises and increases and decreases and we barely register it and do not feel the earth's turning at all beneath us, we reach for the cutting board, the flour, the yeast. We grow up, we grow old, we are born and we live and we die and we resist change with all of our hearts and we yearn to get away, go away, we yearn to come home to the ones we love.

We are brave, we are not, we are strong, we are weak. The moon rises. The bread rises. Our spirits rise and fall, we are a part of it all like a symphony, like a river, like the moon.