January 21, 2016

Only stepping barefoot onto the darkling patio assured me that it had in fact snowed during the night. Cancellations fly– choir practice, my reading in Sylva on Saturday–and yet there really is no snow. Maybe it’s coming and I’ll eat my words.
   
Good classes and alert students. Taught a brilliant class on poetry yesterday. My waking short of breath in the night was the result of cold medicine. Surprising how quickly that becomes automatic and habitual. Took none last night, slept like a bear. I slept in the room where I like to watch the snow fall, but none fell.
   
Stock market catastrophic to my finances. Nothing to be done. It does make me hate silly people who ruin my fortune with their own skittishness.
   
Have had the last few days a renewed awareness of chaos– that my life has no particular center and one thing happens after another with no sense to it. This is not a novelty, of course, but the things that happen have seemed more than usually random or mutually to cancel one another out. The open road is a powerful symbol for me, and I realize now that may be because I have never felt myself to be on one.
   
The little heater hums at my ear. It probably does no real good, but it sounds like warmth.