We drove to Brunswick last night with a passel of poets to watch the student dance concert at Bowdoin. This is the second year we've gone, and it was again an excellent time. Our friend Gwynnie is a stellar teacher (as anyone who attended the conference last year can attest), and her students are a joy to behold. Then afterward we hung out for a while at the hotel bar across the street, a pack of cheerful chatterers out on a frigid Friday night.

It was sweet to glance across the room and see T in busy conversation--my friends morphing into our friends, his shyness slipping away. Underneath his reserve he is funny and sociable and observant, and very interested in other people. But shyness is a suffocating blanket, and all those years in Harmony were no help to him in that regard.

The older I get, the more grateful I feel for this widening circle of engagement. It doesn't make up for loss--nothing will fill the hole that Ray left in us--but it somehow deepens my sense of the necessary patience of love. I think of my dear ones in Wellington and Harmony and Bangor, in New York and Vermont, in Amherst and Chicago and West Tremont and Sarasota, and upstairs asleep in my bed . . . close by, or far-flung  . . . the web of history that binds, the small everyday comforts, the sudden epiphanies, the nothing-special that is everything.