A Halcyon Day!

Finally today I woke with no migraine at all. The jet engines stopped roaring in my ears. The light stopped hurting my eyes. The nausea disappeared. And I could just be glad to be alive.

Bella's mama brought her over to spend a few hours with Gran, and we played and laughed and danced.

This evening after dark, I went to pick up a library book I'd requested, a book of poems by Naomi Replansky, who I learned about on Facebook, thanks to Paula Grant. Replansky's in her 90s and still writing poems about aging, about love, about loss. Take this, for example:

Loss in Los Angeles

Outside, unmoving smog.
How can there be a hurricane in your head?
Around you, gardens too sweetly scented.
How can you contain wilderness?
The rainy season is over.
What is that wet on your cheeks?
--Naomi Replansky.*

On my way home, I was in love with being alive, walking the streets with no pain in my head, watching how traffic lights drench wet streets like paint: green! orange! red!

And then I saw these three pumpkins beaded in raindrops. One is the size of a boulder. It must weigh eighty pounds. You'd need a truck to carry it home. The others are as tiny as limes and pale, pale yellow. Someone balanced them in the dark, under a street light, like a cairn. Like prayer stones. Like a remembrance of pumpkins past. I am in love with these pumpkins.

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*Replansky's blog is here, with information about how to find her books.