Dear Wigleaf,

Don't worry about me. It's cold enough this week that field mice are coming into the basement, searching for warmth, but the sky is clean and beautiful. There's a plastic jar full of ashes on the high shelf in the living room, and sometimes I forget it's there. At the mortuary, a white SUV in the parking lot had a license plate that said UNDRTKR, which made me smile. Maybe you can stay sad all the time, but mostly I try and fail.

A little while ago, we took our car to the shop and they found a mouse nest in the engine bay. We'd just come home from a trip to Chicago, six hours each way, and I felt guilty about the mice on the highway, the engine shaking and burning them up. But it turned out they would have only used the nest at night, so we'd left without them. They managed all right.

So will you.

Gen