From the porch I trade insults with a chattering squirrel but he wins when I scrunch my face and cough.  His flickering tail chides me.  I take another sip of coffee and find myself smiling.  I’ve read the Times so I know the worrisome news but in the luminous sunshine only encouragement reigns.

I switch from the NYT app to social media.  Someone has posted the twelve principles of karma.  I study them for a few minutes, thinking that I can argue myself up or down from there.  Did I love unwisely because I hate myself or do I hate myself because I loved unwisely?  Am I stuck in a holding pattern because I still have lessons to learn? Or is it simply a case of putting the pieces together to justify what I already know?

I shake my head and take another sip from my crystal mug.  Cold coffee.  The dog barks in the side yard.  A police car drives down my street, pausing for the flick of a darting animal.  I glance at the Lost cat sign taped to my storm door and wonder if it has come home.

In the kitchen  I start a kettle for tea and stand doing stretches while I wait.  My muscles still ache from Friday’s yardwork and art fair tour.  Saturday saw me nearly useless.  I can clean house or practice law but not both on the same day.  It’s not a complaint; it’s just how it is.  Now and ever.  A body with limits but a mind willing to expand its horizons.  Thank God for words; I devour them, I spew them back.  They take me where I can’t walk, up mountains and into the river.  They let me speak to distant ears.

My mind has begun composing a request for review in a Juvenile Court case where I must pit myself against a state agency and a rabid parent aide to protect my one-year-old client.  I’ll do what I must to save this child.  No one else seems to have her safety as a priority.  She has five siblings, four of whom, like her, live in foster homes.  The mother got arrested last week and the caseworker wants to brush it under a rug.  I’m the bad guy for even questioning her innocence.  She was the victim!  Explain then, why only she left in handcuffs.  If my client goes back to that home unsupervised it will not be because I fell asleep at the wheel.

The kettle boils.  I take the sweet  little mug which Trudy made for me over to Joanna’s secretary.  I lower myself into the straight-back chair, the one in which I always sat when visiting my in-laws.  Silence surrounds me.  I raise my hands, and like Van Cliburn, start to tickle the keys.

It’s the seventh day of the forty-first month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

My view as I write.