The temperature has plummeted again. It is two degrees this morning, but the furnace is growling and the cottage is warm. It still feels odd not to head straight to the woodstove every morning. Now I light the stove only in the evenings--for the spectacle of flame, as much as anything. Last night Tom was working late on shelves and drawers, so I started broth for chicken soup, put a Beethoven piano concerto on the record player, and curled up on the hearthrug beside the bright fire, where I read all evening, switching back and forth between a Michael Chabon essay in the New Yorker and Irene Nemirovsky's novel David Golder. I will be sad when I get too old and stiff and blind to spend my evenings reading by firelight on a hearthrug.

Today: Going for an afternoon walk with a dear young woman. Cheering up my houseplants with some fresh soil. Figuring how to get the scanner to work so I can email a discussion essay to my class. Trying to remove some lingering ugly dirt from the bathroom. Watching Tom set up his new TV. Carrying the cat around on my shoulder. Wondering how I feel about the novels of Irene Nemirovsky. Wishing we could finally get the goddamn dishwasher out of the living room. When will that plumber ever come?

For now, though, I am lingering in the still-dark: drinking black coffee, tapping out a few words to you. And I'm thinking about the brief correspondence I had yesterday with a young man I have known for a decade. I've watched him struggle with near-death addiction and family chaos, and tremendous loss and grief. Yet he has now earned three degrees, holds a professional position, lives in peace with a beloved partner. The grief and chaos are not behind him, but they have become a foundation rather than a swamp. He wrote to me, thanking me for my trust in him. And I wanted to sing, or maybe cry . . . not with hubris, not as a way to gloat to myself "I saved him!" or any such absurdity. Just for the modesty of our lives and interconnections. The humility of self-knowledge. The ease of slipping into the abyss. The invisibility of our struggles and our successes. Just the regular feeling of being human, and not knowing, from day to day, if I'm making a terrible mess of things or maybe, now and again, managing to get something right. Tomorrow, no doubt, I'll get it wrong again.