It’s dark as the inside of my fist at five o’clock. I’m driving into spitting snow, my brand-new studded snow tires grinding. My companion and I are talking about all kinds of things — how language shapes our worldview and the personalities of tuxedo cats and dentists. I’m driving more by faith than anything else, not particularly fast, headlight beams filled with snow. As if cued, a deer waits in the forested roadside. I slow, then stop, people and deer staring at each other. Then the deer vanishes into the woods.

On this backroad, I’ve passed no other vehicle save a UPS truck, so I wait for a moment for the deer to return, for a companion to leap across the road.

My passenger says, apropros of some conversational thread, that I’ve shed bad karma in my months of cancer treatment, of struggling to survive. My devotion has always been my pencil or keyboard, not the meditation cushion. And yet…

I roll my car forward through the swirling snow. I’ve long adhered to that ancient Aristotelian notion that action defines character. When I realized I had cancer, a year ago, I was rapidly veering towards sepsis. I could not indulge any opinion. To survive, I had to strip away illusion. What were the facts? What was the wisest way forward? None of this was simple.

Cancer narrowed my world. Through weakness and the possibility of a fatal infection, I was confined to my few downstairs rooms, to Emergency Rooms, and hospital rooms. But unexpectedly, cancer widened my life, too, gave me the gift of friendships forged in rough experiences, reinforced for me that this world is propelled by cause-and-effect, that actions have consequences, and that I often grasp only the slenderest knowledge.

New England November drives us into the season of early darkness, blackness so profound our eyes struggle to navigate. When I left Dartmouth-Hitchcock after that last long stay, I felt old, aged in bone and flesh, and concurrently, miraculously restored to my twenties, those years when my lust for living and creating was ravenous and I did not yet comprehend the immutability of time. At the end of this evening drive, I stand for a few moments in this velvety and freezing darkness, snow hissing on the hot car hood, a slender strand of white lights twinkling in my kitchen window. I clench my mittens in my cold hands. Around me, beguiling night.

“When you survive something that was thought to be unsurvivable, the obvious is gained. You have your life—you have time. But it’s only when you get there that you realize your survival has come at a cost.”
― Suleika Jaouad

And last… my story “Tiny Towns” appears in the new collection: 2050: Vermonters Take a Swipe at the Future. Reading tonight in St. Johnsbury….