New Year.

Brand spanking, even. Cold and bright and a little heat in the sun when the wind's not blowing, but it's blowing, mostly, something colder coming in behind it. Every now and then, out of the north and west, a few torn pieces of cloud come sliding through.

AMR leaves tomorrow, and the prospect of a month alone, a month of work, a month inside the book— all that hangs out there in front of me and scares the shit out of me and I'm looking forward to it and horrified by it all at once. A return to a thoroughly selfish life for a while: not malignantly selfish, but a life in which I must really only attend to what wind blows through my own head at any given time.

When I'm working, the best days look like this: coffee, an hour or two in the studio, a dogwalk, another hour, lunch and the gym, an afternoon hour revising, and then evening, a little radio, maybe a game on TV, somewhere to sit down. Get up the next day and try again. Invent an errand or two some afternoons, go to the store for a lightswitch, for a box of screws, break something and put it back together again.

What's required: do everything you can to get your work done while she's gone, to get ready to work more when she comes back. Get ready for her to leave, get ready for her to return. It'll be January. Play your cards right and it'll snow, settle the whole street down into that deep kind of quiet that comes with snow. Sodium streetlight reflecting orange up off the streets. Stand out on the porch and look out at it, be happy to see it, be sad she's not there to see it with you. Stand out there, though, all the same.