By Maggie Smith
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
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It was a lovely New Year's Day that started with chat with my high school friends, for which I was late because I had no idea what day of the week it was when I woke up. But everyone made it, with guest appearances by everyone's husbands and a few children including Adam and Haley. We had leftover eggnog waffles for lunch while watching the back-and-forth of the Peach Bowl.
Then we went to Juanita Bay Park to see the migrating trumpeter swans. We also got to see bald eagles, wood ducks, mergansers, wigeons, gadwalls, buffleheads, mallards, and green-winged teals, plus lots of evidence of beavers having gnawed away chunks of trees that fell down in the storm that took out our power. It was overcast but not drizzly and we could see the Cascades driving back.
We stopped at Safeway for lemon juice so Paul could make eggs benedict for dinner, which we ate after the disappointing end of the Rose Bowl and watching War of the Rohirrim with Cheryl. Because the Sugar Bowl was postponed after the horrible attack in New Orleans, we then watched the Bakshi animated Lord of the Rings after lighting candles for the last night of Chanukah.
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