I feel like I am a forest fire; the way I move, the way I do, the way I am being in this life right now, this day, this week. The minutes are match sticks, my forward motion flint, the hours bursting into flame. Blink, the day gone in the heat of the moment.
Outside the snow is high above my head where the snow has been plowed to clear the narrow path for our cars to leave or arrive. I should be out shoveling, carving wider paths for our feet: to the woodpile, the chickens, the front door, but I am not. I am in the a state of perpetual mid-production; I am not in motion only when I am sleeping.
I miss running outdoors; I lingering. I need some unwind time in a big way, but I don’t think it’s going to happen this week. There isn’t a single thing that can drop off the list of absolutes except exercise, intimacy, and sleep.
What do you do in the midst of weeks like this?
I stand by the heat of the wood stove, circling the present moment in my head like a dog preparing for sleep. It’s snowing again, although dawn was bright and clear: the truest pinks and the most pale persimmon clouds. Now everything is back to white on white, and the bird feeder needs filling.
Today I am torn by what I want to be doing and what I ought to do. All morning T and I attempt conversation, fail, and attempt again. At the root of it: we miss each other desperately. We both want to fold into each other’s arms and have an afternoon just us in a café somewhere, but instead there are boys, and homework, and book work, a party tonight, and so the day ends up mostly being about adjacent circles rather than concentric ones, and in our longing we miss our mark, push each other away, and feel the distance more acutely.
It was fascinating to start the new year in the sky. To watch the curve of the earth appear below, as the plane lifted off, at once heavy and weightless as it cut the clouds and traveled upward improbably into the wide expanse of atmosphere above the earth. 
Right this very instant slushy rain is falling hard and downstairs, at the kitchen island my boys are playing drums on an array of kitchen implements. They are loud, they are ruckus, they are delighted with themselves. Bean is singing along at the top of his lungs in his thin, sweet, off-tune little voice. Sprout is mostly quiet except for when something is taken from him, and then he hollers as loud as he possibly can.
These boys are the sweetness and marrow of my life. 
Today the first snow. Not really the fat flakes of later winter, but the quiet delicate fluttering of small flecks of snow nonetheless. The sky is gray except for where the clouds are pulled thin, and then the sun shines through with milky light. Out my window birds arrive: chickadees, blackbirds, crows. The alight among the bare twigs, and preen, the slight fleeting snow falling on their feathers.
This is as close as I’ve come this week, to being out doors: watching from my window as the world turns to winter outside. And I can hardly believe it: winter, just like that. The days darker, and darker still. Inside, I’m at my desk; an itemized to-do list hanging on the wall in front of me: 34 projects of varying degrees of critical importance to be accomplished by December. Two weeks. 
By Wednesday night I can hear my heart thud, thudding in my chest as I wait for a glass to fill with water, or scrub the dinner pots and pans after the boys have gone to bed. It is a hollow drum in the hull of my chest; my rib bones lifting and falling shallowly, more fragile now, after days with too little sleep and so much to think.