I am gradually catching up with myself. My life abides in long arcs that bend toward justice.

It will all end badly because that is what happens to life and to lives. But in the meantime I begin to perceive how extraordinarily lucky I am.

In certain twisted but important ways, this is the life I always dreamed of living.

When I was fifteen, I thought the way to get there was to live in the forest and be completely mobile.

By the time I was twenty-three and finally got myself the medical help I had always needed so desperately, I had slept on the bare ground enough times to know that sometimes a place with a roof was a luxury worth trading my precious time-and-consciousness for, but I was still a complete moron about who I traded with, and how.

Losing my stupidity in slow degrees, I went to school. I drove their trucks. I went back to the one school, as a teacher this time and I professed what they wanted me to profess, during the time they paid me for, and what I wanted to profess when my time was more or less my own.

I worked and that worked, for a while. Then it stopped.

Tonight in Silver City where there is land but still no roof, it is raining. Here in the flat place with the roof, it is clear, the sun is down, and we are on our way to twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit, with a wind out of the west and northwest. Inside it will not drop below sixty, and it will cost a lot to keep it that way, but I have the cash, in the very short term, and I have ways and wiles for keeping it just above sixty after that.

In answer to writing those words, the furnace comes to life for another pulse.

What I am doing, meantime, is backing up 300,000 files, even though only 3000 of them mean anything.

When it is all done, I will back up this file too, and that picture, and put them in their own folder called “9”, and put that in a different folder called 11, and 2023, and so on. There will be structure; there will be a record. I do this for myself. I do it for you.

Because the honest cold is finally here, the stray cats are sticking very close to the glass door, and not acting wild at all, though they bitch at each other. They know that if they’re cute and trusting enough, my hand will slip out through the side of the door and my hand will be full of treats they can turn into calories.

In this way, and for reasons that are often opaque, I pay it forward.