It all starts with the weather…. Through the woodsmoke season that opens all hearts’ doors into kitchen industry and soup on the stove, the signs wink at you from everywhere: sticks of kindling, brushstrokes of snow on branches–this is the whole world calling you to take up your paired swords against the coming freeze.
Barbara Kingsolver, “Where It Begins,” in Vogue Knitting, Fall 2022, page 24.
EDITING THE FINAL DETAILS of one's life is like editing a story for the final time. It's the last shot an editor has at making corrections, the last rewrite before the roll of the presses. It's more painful than I anticipated to throw away files and paperwork that seemed critical to my survival just two weeks ago, and today, are all trash. Like the manual for the TV that broke down four years ago, and notebooks for stories that will never be written, and from former girlfriends, letters whose value will plummet the day I die. Filling wastebasket after wastebasket is a regrettable reminder that I have squandered much of my life on trivia.
Jack Thomas (Source)