Outside the bungalow in which I live, snow covers the asphalt, the Prius, and the back porch rail with its bird droppings and broken twigs.  The dog has nipped down to the yard and hastily back, running past me at the kitchen door to curl into a warm ball on her bed.  I’m drinking leftover coffee and wondering if Jenny Rosen will still want to venture into the city for Sunday morning breakfast.

Winter has arrived, here in the flat Midwest.  Its winds howled in the night, waking me, shifting unease across the surface of my sleeping mind.  It lay strewn across my dreams, sand on a shoreline, imbedded with zigzag prints from nighttime travelers and skittering critters.

I set the house alarm and climb the stairs to my room.  Through the slats of the broken blind, I see a long stretch of the gentlest blue imaginable, tentative and teasing.  I hear nothing except the noise in my ears and the faint sound of traffic on a nearby boulevard.

My bones ache and a tightness has settled into the space between my shoulder blades. Cold grips my ankles as I move through the room.  But I do not feel grim.   My eyes still see,  through their wispy veil, the cataracts that have not deepened enough for the surgeon’s knife.  My heart dances its lopsided jig.  My creaky joints still bend.

It’s the seventeenth day of the twenty-fifth month of My Year Without Complaining. Life continues.