la fleur épuisée: just another out-of-print flower

This has been my view these nine months, the north-looking angle from the living room windows. This has been my tree. Those have been my mountains. Even today, when the sky is all glowering with rain and the trees have their overcast-day damp darkness, I find it beautiful. After five years of looking out on brick, these branches and peaks and wide sky have been a balm to my soul.

I am feeling nostalgic before the end of this era: sipping my tea and looking out at the rain, distracted from my writing project and my laundry and the million little tasks that make up a day. Amid the stresses of finding a place to rent in a city 600 miles away and across a national border (long distance calls! all of them!), what I am most compelled by this morning is the rain, the view, the green, the bird chatter.

We know goodness best, perhaps, when we contemplate its ending.