It's spring and everywhere there's wetness.  To equip myself for a hike in the woods I find myself stripping down, preparing to swim.  The earth is soft and treacherous--a terrain rigged with spongey organs of humus ans slippery chutes down steep ravine banks.  Buds have appeared on the tips of branches, as sudden and overwhelming as my first acne attack.  Birches are shedding tubes of bark like pale ladies loosening their corsets.  Snow is shrinking away from the base of trees, as if the flora, remembering its eminent place in the woods, has reclaimed the land by manifest destiny:  "We were here first.  And here we will remain, long after you dissolve."
   
    I went for a walk, on this Saturday afternoon, to clear my head.  I'm trying to remind myself that there will be life after Harvey.  He is leaving, and there are no alternatives.  The thing is, though, that he reads to me.  When it's late and we're too excited about life to watch a movie, we crawl into bed and he removes the bookmark, which holds our place in the story while we are at work and dealing with the things that we purport to care about.  His voice caters to the characters while his hand combs my hair, and his cracked heels, peeping out from the holes in his socks, blink at me like a voyeur trying to find out what love is.