The Week

 

Yesterday I started class with some Eliot: 

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable Zero summer?

I mean the day was incredible, wasn't it? I walked as much as possible--to and from work with a walk when I had a break and Blaze and I walked to his piano lesson. 

Listening to Blaze and his teacher go back and forth during his lesson is a real delight. She pushes him; he pushes back. Who knew my quietest kid would be my most outgoing? He really likes her and he really likes piano. 

In my middle age, I've really come to love the trees in the winter, silhouetted against the sky--especially when silhouetted against the changing colors of sunrise or sunset. I love the different ways they grow, their different shapes. I love what they're still holding on to from the fall. I love--in the earliest trees--the swell in the buds already. 

I was so tired yesterday--Blaze had woken me up quite early and I had therapy--so Francisco made wonderful tacos with loads of guacamole. (Trying to eat all the avocados now, just in case they get tariffed.)