"For some reason, no one likes to be told that they do not read enough poetry."

                                                      --Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

Five Meyer lemons sit in a porcelain bowl on a slab of bluestone on my kitchen counter. A shy spaghetti squash lurks in the corner.

* * *

I meant to take Vita out for a ride yesterday, but editing and housework got the best of me. Today, maybe. The temperature is supposed to climb into the 50s, and I am almost done with a chapter. I need to run some Thanksgiving-related errands and clean the bathrooms, and then I'll be free to slowly pedal among the graves, alongside the silent frog ponds, past massive oaks and maples.

Tomorrow we'll head west for the holiday, and I'll be intermittent here. I hope you have a day of comedy, good cheer, and comfortable digestion but also breathe a whiff of melancholy for past and future.

This will be our first Thanksgiving, since their birth, without either of our boys. Sadness has its stories to tell, and time wanders a twilight road.