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In the car it’s warm. The windshield is dirty but I don’t wash it because I’m afraid the wipers will break again. The morning sky is glorious nevertheless. The naked woods against the sunrise clouds make me want to buy oil paints and canvas and there you sit so perfect and so quiet.
And all I can give you are those three deer huddled in the cold, dark meadow.
Your grandmother, we don’t tell her this to her face; she wasn’t the best mother in the world, by turns overwhelming and insufficient, but she gave me roses and daffodils and violets hiding close to the soil. She gave me clouds and the smell of barkdust in the spring and the colors of grass, and I have to think of her whenever the sun comes out while it’s still raining and your mother bundles everyone outside as if it were the first rainbow ever there, over the neighbor’s house, just look at that!
Get a load of those trees, I say. A hundred thousand shades of winter per ten by ten plot.
All I can give you is my love, and I worry it’s not sufficient.
There are so many shades of blue, you say.

Above all, this morning I would like to thank my subconscious for my eccentric homestay family, rural English intellectuals in a cluttered house, and the homestay father who painted himself yellow and blue each morning, in a different pattern daily, everything but his curly ginger hair; and for the beautiful moor outside the house, in autumn colors, pools of water reflecting the sky with a fine clarity; and for the gangs of geologists exploring the region on a large sailboat for National Geographic, taking tons of photographs and removing their shoes and piling them up, shoes which, viewed upside-down, made expressive faces that amused Gamma mightily when I pointed them out to her.