I shaved my legs for the first time in over five months. It was great fun. I wore my wig to radiation and they all loved it, though they also love my bare head. They think I should come wigless and hatless tomorrow. I feel like I am standing on the edge of a pool, building up the courage to dive in. I think Monday might be a better day for it though. I am getting used to not wearing a hat in the house since it is a bit warmer, so I do run in and out of the house without a hat. The plants don't care. I woke up in the night, and went out to caress the new rose. I felt it needed comfort in its new home. It was shivering a bit in the wind and cold, though the sky was amazingly light in the night. Today is cold and foggy, so it is hat weather outside, no matter what.
I am reading a most wonderful book Every War Has Two Losers. It is by William Stafford, who as I have mentioned, was a conscientious objector during WWII. He wrote the following poem when he was living in a camp for conscientious objectors in the mountains of California. He and his companions were fighting forest fires.
THESE MORNINGS
Watch our smoke curdle up out of the chimney
into the canyon channel of air.
The wind shakes it free over the trees
and hurries it into nothing.
Today there is more smoke in the world
than ever before.
There are more cities going into the sky,
helplessly, than ever before.
The cities today are going away into the sky,
and what is left is going into the earth.
That is what happens when a city is bombed:
Part of that city goes away into the sky,
And part of that city goes into the earth.
And that is what happens to people when
a city is bombed:
Part of them goes away into the sky,
And part of them goes into the earth.
And what is left, for us, between the sky and the earth
is a scar.
Los Prietos
20 January 1944