The drizzle started up yesterday afternoon, while we were strolling down Washington Avenue from the oyster shop to the poutine shop, and by the time we got home it had settled into a steady, leak-into-the-basement kind of downpour. In the back room Tom watched Japanese noir. In the living room I watched the wood fire and worked on a poem. And then eventually we reconvened to eat cheese and play Wingspan--a fine and lazy ending to a generally lazy day. All evening the rain ticked against the windows; all night long it drummed the roof. I woke and slept and woke and slept to the sound of rain, and I dreamed of being at my kitchen table in Harmony.

Though much of yesterday was play, I did read poetry collections, and I'll work through another batch of contest books today. For now, though, I am basking in the young warmth rising from the registers. Black coffee steams in a white cup. A jar of daffodils suns on the kitchen counter. Tom is burrowed into the deep Sunday-morning repose of the full-time construction worker, and a wet cat noisily crunches chow.

Outside, in the darkness, the fragrance of spring rises from the sodden soil. When I open the back door, a small wind wraps around me like a watery veil. What's new, what's new? whispers the ash tree, and a possum scuttles into the shadow of the neighbor's garage.

The salt Atlantic laps at the docks of this small city teetering at the nation's northeastern edge. Up the hill, a little plain-faced house squats on its skimpy plot beneath the brittle bare arms of towering maples. Inside the house, two aging lovers and their difficult cat; inside, books and pantry shelves and folded cotton sheets. It is the most unspectacular of happy endings. It is one brief tale in the story of a world that is collapsing into ashes.