Editing, bread baking, animal chores, and laundry. Snow and sunlight. Ten hens and a self-satisfied rooster. Footprints and frozen water buckets and firewood and two barking dogs. A goat scratching her back against a tipsy fence. Clean sheets and wet towels. Five lines of Wordsworth and a half-cup of Arborio rice. Ice-rimmed kale, a muddy floor, two chapters about a whale, and quiet. The mysterious disappearance of a check-engine light.

The future looms. Watching a Simpsons rerun and The Jazz Singer on the very same evening. Or watching nothing. Or playing cribbage and drinking cognac. Or forgetting to put clean sheets on the bed until I'm ready to get into bed. Or remembering to put them on and then climbing between them, clutching a book I have no intention of reading because I'll be asleep and dreaming about geese dressed as small boys, or telephones that won't telephone because the buttons are too small for my fingers, or a careening motorcycle steered by a string.

Meanwhile, the stars will shine--private, indifferent, like cows spread across a night meadow.