Peace

It was evening all afternoon

When we had winter

I woke up very early this morning and it was snowing like it used to. There was the promise of real accumulation, the thought of which pleased me, and I fell back to sleep. When I woke a couple of hours later, the snow had stopped but the sky still threatened and I held out hope it might snow again.

On days like this, I think of my favorite Wallace Stevens poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” The last section (or “sensation” as Stevens called them) is my favorite:

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

Unfortunately, it never did start to snow again, but there was snow on the ground and the parked cars for a couple of hours. I reminisced about what winter used to be like—a couple of blizzards every year and the deep silence that comes with a heavy snowfall; staying inside and watching movies all day; drinking hot chocolate.

I’ve been laying low the last couple of weeks—it’s so much easier to do that when it’s cold and grey and you’re snowbound snowbound, otherwise it feels like cheating —because I needed to detach a little bit; to see if I could get my head around what happened this year while trying to figure out how to prepare for 2025. It’s all felt rather breakneck since the 2020 election. I need to figure out how to pace myself—we all need to pace ourselves—while engaging in this new fight, that’s really the old fight, the one we grew complacent about, the one too many of us mistakenly believed had been won. That’s much of what I’ll be writing about as we head towards the Inauguration.

But first, my gratitude to all of you—for sticking with me, for your support, for your beautiful and thoughtful comments, for joining me over at the Mary Trump Media Channel. I can’t pretend that next year will be easy. I think we all know that much of it will be intolerable, but having all of you in this community is an immeasurable help to me.

Thank you.