Thursday night, 12:55 a.m. The first hot "cocoa" of the season--drip of honey, spoonful of carob, heated in cup o' milk. Mm. I can hear trees' leaves outdoors. I'm lying under blankets in my clean earhiss bedroom and I can hear the leaves in the great cottonwood down the block, long fluttery rustles in the moving air of the quiet night. Train whistle a bit ago. Guess it's a horn, really, but a nice distant chord anyway, behind the leaves.

This was a peaceful domestic day. Peaceful dreams in last night's sleep, peaceful morning opening my brain to WBYeats--a wise decision, I think. I feel better about him already. I just--I had this snarky English prof in college who taught Yeats as a means to express his angst over aging, and it was sort of creepy, and the creepiness sort of bled into the Yeats, which already has a bit of its own creepiness, the work, a bit of a twist to it. Perhaps it's the gyre. Anyway, thanks to Mr. Rosenthal's study it's becoming clearer to me, and more pleasurable to read.

Then laundry, all day with the washing and the drying and the folding of it. All of mine, all of brotherB's, all bedsheets and blankets and furniture coverings.

I wrapped and mailed six books and took a load of glass to the recycler.

Moved sprinklers around, front and back. Watered houseplants. We ate a good supper and watched the final final Buffy DVD. ArtguyJim phoned, late, and we caught each other up on life on our respective sides of the Warner Mountains. After the last episode on the disk, and Spike's great triumph, Brian took his bath while I shut up the house, took out the trash, got the last cat in.

Hugged B goodnight, then, made up my clean bed, got on clean PJs, made a honey-carob cocoa.

Somewhere in there I was blessed with a great epiphany and a peace entirely new to me--not the usual umpteenth Realization I keep forgetting and then Realizing again. It was Important, this feeling, and it happened a couple of hours ago, from here. I wanted to rush to get it down in writing before it faded, as though it were a dream and would vanish behind the retreating memory-chemical. But I am perverse, and kept up the evening bustle, finishing small tasks. And then once I did start writing--you can see how much precedes it, that's how reluctant I seem to be to try to pin it down.

Can I relate it before sleepiness numbs me? Well, it was only this: I just unexpectedly--not "suddenly," which implies a sort of violence, but quietly, like a kind of interior melting, slow and certain and plain and obvious and clear--had the feeling that my life has been wonderful. Wonderful. I have known a dozen kinds of love at a hundred intensities. The people I've touched and who have touched back. I've made babies and fed them with my body and watched them grow up and seen their babies and accomplishments--inexpressible joy. Great successes, great failures. I've known overwhelming rage and tremendous fear, blackest hate and the blinding-white nearness to a kind of God-level agape. The closeness of families and an aloneness so complete I went mad from it. Faith, betrayal--my own and others'. So many colors and intensities in the spectrum of human emotion.

And it's all good. Amazing, even. And, yeah, fading a little, finally. Remember, dammit.