Tonight, after digging seventy-five feet of irrigation ditch through frozen gravel, I watched the sunset from the backyard. I was tired, and feeling out of shape, and a little irritated at struggling to do at 54 what had come easily at 21. But the ditch was running a decent head of water and it wasn’t a metaphor. My shovel, freshly sharpened at the end of the day, wasn’t a trope. I had a beer in my hand. The words for all of it didn’t matter as much as the fact that I wouldn’t have to ever dig that section of ditch again.

Two sandhill cranes flew over the house and muttered their way to a landing on the riverbank. The sun turned the clouds bright gold and the peaks to black silhouettes. A cold wind came down the valley and I went inside and built a fire in the woodstove. Time seemed linear, and accelerating, and life seemed not long enough to dig all the ditch that needed to be dug. It may have been illusion, but I thought I had found a life that wasn’t framed by an institution, and I found myself believing it to be the whole world, and I wasn’t going to leave it without a fight.