There’s something quieting and comforting about everyday concerns, as we follow stormy events, both political and meteorological. Our president-to-be can only really be helped by all of us, thinking him strong thoughts, giving what we can to equity and sanity and understanding, and gently going about our business.

In our own family, an old school bus, a Skoolie named Ernest, grows finer by the day, as our oldest son, Tom, and his wife, Jamie, rebuild and fashion his insides.

We watch the spring creep in. Our daughter, Hester, spends a day giving vaccinating shots. And readying for sleep, I say to myself in the quiet dark, a poem, by Ursula Le Guin:

McCoy Creek: Eddies

Downstream from the rock, the half-baffled current spins
into a few small whirlpools, water-knots
that curl their way along, loosen and disappear,
one vanishing while another one begins,
brief, clear, quick beings or events –
                                        I lose the difference
of thing and act: the rock itself a knot
untied in time, the creek its own recurrence, and my thought
a glint of slipping sunlight caught
in running water –