A Now Dogless Summit

Learning to let rats live with me in the hayloft. Ben Franklin in his cups, Susan Dickinson settling for her true love's brother. Just before dawn the rain turns briefly to sleet, light wind coming down the valley with a high lonesome moan. Your telephone is my long walk to a now-dogless summit. In a sense to which I am not alien, it's Hank Williams songs all the way down. One sentence more precious than another, as if that ever helped anyone! We were a family in ways that confused me, patriarchy always an ill-fitting cover for the way things really worked. And yet there is a woman in whom all your pain is disappeared, on terms and conditions too pure to have come from you. Who makes the ends meet? Some storms last for days, others pass with the faintest of faint traces. How open any heart becomes when you call on it to open!