Still Life

We are addicted to the radio. And slow cooked oats. Amber hand grinds every cup of coffee we drink. If I want to bathe it means first stoking the wood stove till it's hot enough to warm a big pot of water. But there's plenty of time because Amber's still swaddled in fleece and quilts and down, and beside the bed is a tall stack of books: Cat's Cradle, books about building your own home, a book about the big questions in science, a Jack London collection, and The Field Guide to Animal Tracks which we've both read cover to cover, twice. My notebook is balanced on top of Drop City by TC Boyle. I'm writing out passages of it, consuming it in the slowest way possible because it is that good.

There's time to bake a cake with filling and frosting, and to drink three pots of tea. Time to keep watch on the ocean, though the whales must know it's still April. Time to read all the old New Yorkers and New Hampshire newspapers from 2011. Time to draw the trees framed by the window from different angles. Time to do a puzzle without the box. Time to study the atlas and talk endlessly about what we want to do and see. Time to walk, most days, until the road turns to pavement. Time to watch a candle burn until it falls into the bottle neck and the flame turns to blue then fizzles out.