Happily Ever After

A new morning, after a good night's sleep: a strong sense of convalescence. (A word I've never really thought about: I guess it parses to "a coming together of strength"?) Anyway, after many days of short or broken sleep, it is a blessing I know how to value. To close my eyes with no burning, and no sense of uneven relief!

Hammering away at the forge. "It flows from the shoulder; there's a sort of music to it, when you do it right," says Coll. I've always wondered where Lloyd Alexander got that from; if he'd ever actually held a blacksmith's hammer. Anyway. Feeling strong and well. It's possible to feel strong and well. One forgets. 

We drove yesterday on old ragged highways in the hills beyond Corbett and Troutdale, some of it raw with logging, some of it industrial farmland, some of it pretty enough second-growth and pasture. We came across a number of old rusted out trailers and cars, VW buses rusted to earth color and covered with moss. Also church camp after church camp. It's a country suited to the ill-considered, semi-spiritual impulse to bolt and hide. 

I start to mull over retirement, in all its senses. Another ten or fifteen years, and I might be ready to live by some mossy rock, someplace where I could walk in the woods every day. Martha and I -- in what we now recognize as, if not depressive thinking, at least depression-related thinking -- had decided to live in town, rather than out in the country: because we knew we couldn't stand to love a place and then see it overrun with tree-cutters and 7-11 builders, paving everything in sight and stringing wires all over the sky. But the longer you live, the less you need to worry about what twenty years will bring. Even odds that we'll get so far, even now, and decreasing as we go. We might find a quiet corner yet, in view of a river or a mountain or two, and live happily ever after. We might.