Sun after rain, wind after gale. The bare branches switch and tremble and cast sun-shadows through the smudged windows. I am reading Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace. How well she writes about Victorian-era housework!--scrubbing, shelling, bleaching, mending, lighting recalcitrant woodstoves, frying a new egg.

Some of this is the same housework that I do, for now I must go fill the woodbox for my own recalcitrant stove, and empty the kitchen scrap pail, and sweep the steps. But I am not wearing a long dress, and I do not have to haul water. There have been days, even months, when I have had to haul water. It makes everything, everything, so much more difficult.

For an image of life and death
consider ice and water 

--Cold Mountain (born c. 730), from a song translated by Red Pine