On this dark morning, under a new skim of snow, the street-lit houses and cars look like toys forgotten outside, a dollhouse town frozen into a wintry Pompeii . . . until the first car door slams and the scene jolts back to plain old Wednesday.

The days unroll. Last night's reading morphs into today's doctor's appointment into tomorrow's housework. Yards crisscross with squirrel tracks. Fat juncos flutter like leaves. A wrecked car yawns in a ditch. In the windy parking lot at the post office, I clutch a box of Christmas presents as a woman begs me for bus fare to the warming shelter.

It is winter, it is winter, and the sky is streaked with cloud, and the city dogs wear their jackets when they go out to pee, and the country dogs dig up chipmunk burrows and bark at the plow guy, and the man who collects cans has to shove his grocery cart through ridges of salt and slush.

I open a book and a serious person tells me, "Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected," and I believe him, I believe I should read more, should absorb this suffering, I should take it into my deepest self, but the print in this book is very small and my eyes wander off to the high corners of the room, where the spiders refuse to be squelched; every day they tack up new webs, little laundry lines, little hammocks, little traps. "In the Great War eight million people were destroyed because two persons, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his Consort, had been shot." Why is it Consort and not consort? My mind sinks into trivia, I am the least of god's creatures, I wander into the kitchen and fill the kettle for tea.