Feather

We don't create our lives. Our lives create us.
--Jean Renoir, 1975.

This morning I drove the car to the river, parked, and moseyed along the riverside till my feet and hands were numb with cold. I took pictures of spider webs beaded in dew, of foggy vistas fading to white, of wet rocks and preening geese, bridges, trains, docks and joggers. A bedraggled, jeweled goose feather hooked on the end of a stick called to me like a lover, held me for a while, and then let go.

Our lives create us. We get to the river or we don't. We get this job and not that one. We have this child with this illness or ability, and that's more important than anything else, and then the child is an adult, off and gone. We meet someone, fall in love, they settle in or they run away. It works or it doesn't, and everything follows from that. We make something, not what we meant, but the process of making it fills the days and nights for a time.

This afternoon I was snuggled up on the couch, reading Teleri Williams' tender and beautiful poems about her grandmother with Taiga asleep on my chest, when one of Handel's choral pieces started on the radio. Hosannah. "This envelope holds all that remains/ of my grandfather," Williams writes. In this moment everything is perfect.