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| Where peace comes dropping slow. (Yeats) |
My mind is a millstone grinding the grain of memory, my thoughts a low grumble, a millstone rumbling as it grinds against itself while I walk the dark and dripping woods, confronting the past in a world of gleaming leaves, a place without anger or fear where Yeats' peace comes dropping slow.
Walking the woods in the rain, I think of what my mother said in her eighty-eighth year, after the death of her third husband. "The trick," she said, "Is to live without regret." If only.
In this shaded haven where teaberry blooms and spotted salamanders shine under stones, where the rill purls cold on its way to the creek, the low rumble I hear (as strange a comfort as distant thunder) is the slow and heavy grinding of rationalized regret.
Sorry, Mom. You were tougher than me. Some things I would fain not forget.
