Thank you my daughter for fording deep water to arrive at this trendy restaurant banquette, for sitting there eating your bread with a dreamy look and the blue-green-lavender shadows of long afternoon, for my life, my mistakes, the words I lost and uncovered again, for reprise, respite, rest from the struggle that is too often my life, the pink pill under the tongue that keeps me ticking a while, like snowmelt, like season, which I am not, but must hitch myself to, as I do to you— my daughter, chewing the bread and admiring unconsciously the silver curl of the long elegant fork and asking me if this is all costs too much, which, of course, it does. But today we are free as birds; we walk through the arcades of museums prepared to be undone by the sudden ruthless beauty of a splash of crimson on an eggshell wall.