This has become a nightly ritual, after the boys are in bed. To go with the dog, and some good chocolate in my pocket and also a ball point pen, my Molskein notebook, to the pond as the blue hour draws close. Once there, I find the same smooth, flat rock to sit upon, and she settles beside me, her head on my thigh. We watch the water, spread out blue, on blue, ripple folding over ripple as the sky becomes indigo and the bats come out. And I write fast and furiously in the fading light: filling page after page in a loose, easy scrawl.
I care hardly at all about the content. What matters isn't what I write. It matters simply that I do. (I can feel it, how this is already the beginning of something new.)