Standing in sunlight on a warm November day I return to my youth of twenty-eight years with the youth’s paint pallet of colorful thoughts and aspirations.

I take a step toward potential adventures, prospects hungered for but as yet unknown, and the decades return in a rush of cold north wind.

Impatiently I wait for the world to conform to my limitations. The world is indifferent. We become ice in the late years of our lives. We yearn to be water.

I followed a long and twisting ski trail through the north woods and found that parts of me had not returned. A few parts I will miss. Most I was glad to be free of.

You take away a piece of every place you have been. You cannot avoid it, and you cannot get rid of it. Sometimes the piece is a scar, sometimes a beauty mark. For me, most often, a scar.

Not wanting to wander as a stranger in a strange land, I am fixed and difficult to move from this place I call home. But in truth, this is also a strange land.

We are strangers here, wherever on Earth we are. There is no place of comfort except in our imagination. We imagine best where we find unconditional love.

Of late, there are few welcoming places in this world because it is so crowded with people who have their knives out.

I thought I heard rain during the night, but in my time of deafness I could not be certain. Come dawn, I saw it was the silent rain of frost. I hear that more clearly.

Midmorning moonrise. We have left garbage on the Moon and want to return to leave more.

At the coffee shop a plain-faced and thin-bodied young woman was, amazingly!, reading one of the novels I had written. I did not speak to her, thinking it must be an apparition.

And, anyway, I wanted to overhear her say as she read me, “Oh my!”

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