Neoteric.

I find it hard to write sometimes.

Most times, I guess.

I spend most days at some point along a circle: 4:30 a.m., wake up, take medicine, doze on the couch, eyes open at about ten after five, breakfast, shower, hair, dress, kiss Quinn goodbye, go to work, work, lunch, home, dinner, read, sleep, 4:30 a.m.

Wake up.

Quinn and I went to my old home–my parents’ home–for Thanksgiving. It involved a drowsy early-morning journey to the Oklahoma City airport, a flight to St. Louis, another flight to Cleveland, and three days of familial joy. I kept myself from weeping on the way back to Oklahoma by focusing on our puddle-jumping plane and the mycobacterial-sounding whoop of a man several rows behind us.

Oklahoma has been hammered with icicles, ice in elaborate patterns on the asphalt, ice followed by snow. The snow is thin enough to allow the grass to pop up through, visible from our front window, and paltry enough to prohibit any snowman-making or sled-riding. Several hundred thousands–maybe a million?–people were without electricity, and in a land where most people have their own well water directed into their homes with powered pumps, the blackout dragged along a drought, too.

A nineteen-year-old pregnant woman died of carbon monoxide exposure by placing a generator too close to her drafty windows.

I have sat in my office chair, every Monday through Friday, wrapped in a cardigan, watching the lights sometimes flicker. I am warm. I may be uninspired and homesick, but I am with power, with water, and warm.