I have been awake since 4 a.m. because Tom has been awake since 4 a.m., but now he has driven off into the mist and I am here with myself for another week.

The yard is weighted in rainwater and cloud. Everything in sight is soaking wet, and the air is as thick as chowder. I am sitting at the kitchen table looking at the poems of Rilke, but not reading them yet. Sweet williams nod in their vases. The washing machine grinds a load of towels. A hummingbird buzzes the feeder, and now a glint of sun forks its way through the fog.

In "The Ninth Elegy" Rilke writes:

. . . truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

I see what he means, but I also don't see what he means. It is so simple to feel unnecessary, yet here I am: the feeder of an old dog, who would die without me. Here I am, coaching an 18-year-old, via cryptic text message, on how to negotiate the vagaries of middle school canoe-campers who have decided to compose a comic song about him.

Pointless but not pointless. Or as Rilke writes:

Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window--