Life moves on, if slower than the metaphorical molasses in January. Biggle says she’s coming home in two weeks, which I maintain is too late to no avail. I have started a new project, a blanket, of many bright colors. I tried and failed to make headway on both the NYT and LAT crosswords. In a bit, I go to church. Becca might come out in a few weeks. I feel better most days. My stepbrothers make themselves more scarce every day it seems. The house is almost always silent, broken only a few times a day (or night) by the garage door opening and closing, feet running up and down the stairs in quick succession, the fridge opening, the shower at 8am. Then, back to silence.

I’ve been reading a great book called What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, a sort of informal encyclopedia and dictionary about life in nineteenth century England, especially in the aristocracy and gentry, and especially as it relates to the authors of the time we read most – Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, and a handful of others. I also started The Kitchen God’s Wife, and upstairs Nicholas Nickelby, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and Agnes Gray wait for me to get my act together. My Biology book has been laying open on the dining room table for eons now, chastising me for not getting near.

I say my prayers on my knees, read a passage of the bible, write down my daily doings in a notebook, click off the light, finish my prayers, fall to sleep…and, after waking a few times in the night and seeing the darker hours glaring at me from my clock radio, it is morning, and the time is not so bright, having been dimmed by close proximity to the window, and I alight, and get dressed, and make the bed, and go downstairs, and pull out a bowl and spoon and carton of milk and box of cereal and, these days, carton of blueberries, and sit, and read the newspaper, and then get up, put the bowl in the sink, rinse it out…

And after finding things to do to make up the time for about thirteen hours, I’m back, and the lights are off, and my mind is wandering.