At rest with the flu, in a room at the top of an old farmhouse in the rural American Northeast [an excerpt from a short piece in the NYTimes]:

I was raised to believe that sleep is a sovereign remedy for everything but death itself, so I drift between waking and sleeping, visited mostly by one of the cats, who likes the third floor — a converted attic — as much as I do. I wake just long enough to see the snow falling, and to judge how sick I feel, before drifting off again. The pleasure of it — waking only long enough to know you're dozing — confirms something one of Ishmael's shipmates said in "Moby-Dick": "Damn me, it's worth a fellow's while to be born into the world, if only to fall right asleep."

This is for those, like myself, lucky enough to be able to share memories like his but also for those who can only enjoy such beauty through another's account. This is one of Verlyn Klinkenborg's gentle evocations of the place where man meets the rest of nature.