In ten minutes, we shuffle through two months in the forgotten page-a-day calendar on her nightstand. She pauses longest for Homer.

An open book in the road. It flaps and flaps.

I pick you up and bring you home,
like bread/milk/eggs before a storm.

Fiona and Kaspalita of Writing Our Way Home have already compiled January's river of small stones into a lovely little book and chose to include two of mine. Click through and have a look.

Dead of night and the wind chime begins its faint, trickling call.

Street light instead of moonlight. I stop a moment before going inside.

The clouds settle low today, mimic mountains.

Click, click of the warming oven. Butter sitting out to soften.

Cat curled on socked feet, and I slowly feel the day going.

Suddenly: Geese today on the suburban edge of rush hour, 30 or 40 of them on a small stretch of ground, nosing their beaks about in the still-here-after-weeks-of-cold snow.

In the snow, a small tree of robins. They scatter evenly over bare branches, bobbing fat on the ends like strange Christmas ornaments, bright, and feathered, and blinking.

Let the day open.

Snow pulls me down a winding street I do not know.