It has been a fortnight or more since I last sat myself down with any serious intent to wrestle meaning onto paper. The ink has lain idle in its bottle, the pen has gathered a thin film of neglect, and I—well, I have been otherwise engaged in what a charitable man might call painting.

Painting, I say, though the products of my efforts would likely cause a true artist to avert his eyes and murmur a prayer for the canvas. Still, I have sat out on the front porch in the chilled air, a cup of coffee steaming companionably at my elbow, watching the world and time itself slide past like a slow river that has forgotten it is supposed to be in a hurry.

The week before last found me in a considerable funk—one of those low, graying moods that settle upon a man when he suspects the Universe has once again rearranged the furniture of human existence without so much as a by-your-leave. I cannot put my thumb squarely upon the precise nature of the alteration; the change is too subtle, too sly for that.

All I know is that I felt a shift, the third or fourth such tremor in the past decade. These cosmic adjustments seem to arrive faster now, and I, in my olding days, seem to feel them more keenly than I did when youth’s thicker hide and noisier blood offered a measure of insulation. Age, it appears, is a fine instrument for detecting the quietest of empyrean earthquakes.

As for the writing, I have managed a fair share for the Comstock Chronicle, and the pieces that have appeared of late upon The Old Blog in the Desert are drawn from a modest reserve I laid by weeks and even months ago—much as a prudent squirrel stores nuts against the lean season. I keep such a store precisely for times like these, when the great machinery of existence gives another mysterious lurch, and the new thoughts refuse to form themselves into orderly sentences.

It is a practical arrangement, if somewhat undignified: the writer as provisioner against metaphysical weather. And so here I sit still, upon this same porch, coffee cooling, brush occasionally dabbing at something that may or may not deserve the name of picture, observing the slow procession of hours.

The Universe, I suspect, is amused by the spectacle—an aging man attempting to capture a little color and light while the very ground beneath his chair shifts by degrees too fine for ordinary measurement. Yet there is a certain peace in watching, with quiet acknowledgment that not every season is meant for strenuous composition.

Some are meant simply for the porch, the chill air, the coffee, and the patient noting of how the world turns when one is no longer quite so certain of its direction.