With rain in the forecast yesterday, I found the motivation to finish raking the yard. I even broke up the last of the snow bank at the bottom of the driveway so that I could rake under it and not just around it. The remnants of that snow bank, which I tossed around the yard, are gone this morning. I hauled one large load of rakings to the City compost site and called it a day. I didn't have it in me to load up that which remained. I tried to convince myself to just leave it in the back corner of the lot as an addition to the brush/needle/ leaf pile that has been there for years and refuses to decompose appreciably in what I think is a reasonable amount of time. I have come to respect pine needles as pretty sturdy bits and pieces of the natural world.

Even though I couldn't find the energy to finish the clean up yesterday, my moral compass or my tidiness meter remained intact. I found myself mildly troubled by the leftovers or "left-behinds" from yesterday's raking project. This morning early, even before coffee, I loaded up the stuff I pushed to the side yesterday along with a little extra off the old pile, for good measure, and took it to the compost site. Now that job is done; unless I re-evaluate that bit of my recent past and come to the conclusion I missed something.

By the way, the rain has now been pushed out another day--maybe later today. It was originally slated for yesterday evening--around suppertime.

As I finished up the outside work yesterday, the winter bird feeder was put away and replaced with the bird bath. My plan is to put up the finch feeder today; it needs a bit of repair. I have an idea how I might do that, but success may be fleeting.

I have been reading the memoirs of Naula O'Faolain in recent months, which I found totally by accident at the local library. I roam the stacks and look for books, which catch my eye--hardly a thoughtful approach to literature, but not a bad way to meet new people--even ladies, I might add. The first is titled Are You Somebody? and the second is Almost There. Naula is an Irish author, born in 1940 and died in 2008, which makes her a contemporary of mine. Her narrative of growing up in an Irish Catholic family and the lifelong impact of that childhood has given me a perspective from which I find myself reflecting on my own childhood and adolescent experience.

A passage from late in the second book seems so original and insightful; it suggests a function or benefit of writing, which I have never seen articulated before. It reads: "I never wrote for its own sake, I told him [John, her current companion]--I wrote so as simply to live, and then so as to live better, and not just to get better at managing life, but to be a better person." This passage can stand on its own, but it the context of the author's life, it holds a much richer and tragic connotation. These two books are difficult reads, but well worth the effort.