What we've lost. And what we've found.

Today is insanely blue and crisp with the kind of cold that shows your breath and catches it at the same time. There’s still snow up in the hills and Douglas Firs lined up in no longer "vacant" vacant lots and Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/HappyHolidays are upon us, literally squatting, really, demanding attention must be paid, offerings of joviality and radiant happiness and I’m trying to be filled with that, believe me, but mostly what I am is another vacant lot. And I’m sitting here trying not to think of the people I’ve recently lost, which is such a stupid, stupid word—lost—as if they’re not dead I’ve just misplaced them, left them at some cash register or stuffed in a pocket, because I never left them, they left me. They’re gone, done.

You’re left with a hole—and what remains is what you fill it with. As my let-me-bow-before-your-brilliance-like-an-insignificant-child poet du jour W.S. Mervin puts it, "Your absence has gone through me/Like thread through a needle/Everything I do is stitched with its color."

So here’s to the color I look for around every corner, behind every tree, every day. These joyous, breakable times just seem to intensify it.



—Janet