Yesterday in his hospital room my husband asked urgently, “Will you move me twenty-six thousand miles to the left?“”Yes,” I said, not moving from my chair. After a moment he said, “Thank you,” adding in wonder, “I didn’t feel a thing.

What can come?” my grandson Sam asked, when he was very young, after his mother had warned him not to go into the woods after dark. What can come? This was a brilliant question. Can is scarier than will. What will come limits itself. What can come has no boundaries.

Suffering is the finest teacher”, said an old friend long ago. “It teaches you details.

I used to get upset if somebody I didn’t like loved a book I loved. That’s MY book, I’d think.

Is memory property? If two people remember something differently is one of them wrong?

I used to lie in a lover’s arms getting a stiff neck, or needing to scratch my nose, or losing all sensation in my arm, unwilling to move lest the man find out I wasn’t comfortable in his embrace... Would Snow White have rested all eight pounds of her head on any part of the prince? I doubt it, and I never did either. Sarah says that is why elderly women have such prominent cords in their necks.

But when it gets dark, I’m off the hook. The day is officially rolled up and put away. I’m free to watch movies or stare at the wall, no longer holding myself accountable for what I might or might not have gotten done because the time for getting something done is over until tomorrow.

I feel only gratitude. We are doing something as necessary to our well-being as food or air or water. We are steeping ourselves, reassuring ourselves, renewing ourselves, three creatures of two species, finding comfort in the simple exchange of body warmth.

I was young once and slender and pretty and I made the most of it. It’s somebody else’s turn now.

It’s easy now – it’s middle-aged lady, nobody’s looking, nobody notices. I go without lipstick if I feel like it, and I always wear my comfy clothes. It’s a life with fewer distractions, but should something beautiful show up, a middle-aged woman is free to stare.