Even on your worst day you are surrounded by things you care about—

Worst day: let’s not think about the worst day. Let’s think about waiting for the bus in sub zero temperatures and stomping your feet and dropping coins in the snow and wondering why you are doing this when you could still be under the blankets, curled up in dreams? And then the bus arrives and you sit down, frozen fingers tingling back to feeling, and you think of the little boys you waved good-bye to as you ran out the door. How once again love saved you from despair. How you could be a drunk under a bridge or a pile of ashes thrown to the wind but you had those babies to think about, the grandsons, new life. How the little one throws his arms around you and says I love you. And that makes the grief, the bankruptcy, the arguments, the disappointments, the months when you had no home to be embraced and sheltered within, all recede into the past. And you remove your wool beret and run your fingers through your graying hair and think how it could have been cancer like your good friend, dead one month after diagnosis, or it could have been HIV like a man you love, or it could have been the fibromyalgia that plagues a writer you know who can never take a step without planning for ways to reduce the pain. And so you tap your feet in your red suede boots that you bought last minute, thank God, and don’t think about the worst. You think about poems on the computer waiting to be printed and the writing group where you’ll drink free coffee and sit around a warm table, free to be yourself, free to praise the snow.