A stormy day, never truly permitted the clouds to pass, and show the Sun. A Queen of Swords Day.

And the end of The Painted Drum, Louise Erdrich's book. I borrowed it from the library after MG read a section at the Poetry Brunch last month, and it was nearly at the very end of the book, just before the back fly-leaf furled that the passage opened itself to me:

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with the yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.