embrace the moment for everything changes and all this will too

photo: rpeschetz

YOUR MISSION: Download this song [Pumpkin Soup by Patrick Wolf], find the nearest quiet cemetery, sit down and listen to the song. It will change your life.

Yesterday. I leave for a walk near dusk, stopping at the across-the-street neighbour's to help her carry grocery bags. Her husband makes art out of cutlery; in the entryway, there is a sculpture of a tree with carefully-bent forks for leaves. I smile a lot whilst walking, but I am unable to stop grinning walking past some boys playing pick-up street hockey, clouds of breath drifting upwards into the pinking sky. There is a 19th-century cemetery where I walk, where the gravestones are chalky and crumbling, where this winter a few strings of dead leaves cling to the branches, and black birds dot each branch's capillaries in place of green. I have never seen another person there. I sit on the ground and feel the cold from the earth seeping through my jeans. I appreciate the nature of life, that everything changes.

I've been out for an hour, several miles, and when I get home, I eat a bowl of homemade minestrone soup. Later, I bake oatmeal raisin biscuits and read If On A Winter's Night A Traveller barefoot, on the cold floor.