Mars, the god of war, met Venus, the goddess of love, and smitten with her found his blood heated for the first time not by the promise of the grim triumphs of battle but by the promise of, ...well, you know. Nicolas Poussin, the Frenchman who painted this hopeful allegory in Rome in 1628, was obviously no stranger to love, and put everthing he knew about it into the face of Mars--the rapture, the longing to be lost in the eyes of the lover, the fear of that loss, the willingness to abandon what you are to become who it is your lover would have you be.. But perhaps we can learn more about this most celebrated and problematic power if we note what Venus' attendants, those naughty little Cupids, are up to. They've emptied Mars' quiver (feel free to take this literally if you choose) and begun to put his arrows to a more peaceful use as weapons of love. Weapons of love? Did I say that? In any case, one Cupid stands ready to poke Venus should she waver, perhaps, in her ardor, and another, finding the head of an arrow too dull, busies himself with sharpening it on a stone. Hey, it's just a painting. It's not real. What's real, and real important, is that you stay by the people you love, always, and that if you are lucky enough to be pierced by one of the arrows that the Cupids' swiped from Mars, you take the wound seriously and love your lover like you would love yourself.

It seemed a little expensive but I had been in the country too long, living clean, breathing the tasteless, clear air, and was willing to pay just about anything for a few lungfulls of that tasty brown gaseous sludge. It was everything I'd imagined, dreamed about and needed, and for an extra few bucks, the proprietor even threw in a two litre dose of high altitude ozone which lent a top note to the mix that simply left me breathless.

As John Singleton Copley painted it in 1778, the story of Brook Watson's swim in Havana Harbor would appear to have only one possible outcome, and it is in our flinching anticipation of that outcome, the fact that we barely need to flex our imagination at all to go there, that the tension lies. Drat. In trouble again, and almost certainly for the last time. The painting itself hangs in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and is at least six feet wide. This is just a portion of the whole thing which includes a more complete set of characters and other drama such as a stalwart sailor about to launch a gaff into the side of the shark. So the peril is actually balanced and only if you know the full story can you step aside from the maudlin certainty of Watson's imminent demise that the painter sought to hook his viewers with. As it turned out, Watson lost a leg to the shark, the shark lost its life to the gaff, and Watson went on to become a rich merchant with just one leg and a great story.

Old heron nest 20 feet up a dead pine, snow blowing from the northeast. Only the tracks from our skis on the frozen pond, gone an hour later.

In 1940 the place was graced with two guest cabins and advertised itself as Mink Hill View. Motorists on their way from from Claremont to Concord could refill their tanks and buy sodas and sandwiches and stand on the porch and look across the hayfield to the south, across the Warner River and up to the 1000 foot tall hills of the Minks. One of the cabins burnt, the other was stolen and now sits with several others about two miles away at a bed and breakfast. The main house itself before 1900 was the railroad station in Waterloo when Teddy Roosevelt first stepped off the train here, but he found the building too modest for his tastes and arranged to have it moved up the road and had built in its place a more fitting railroad station. And we are the last in line of I don't know how many owners.Perhaps half a dozen. The house has sprouted gables and skylights and enclosed porches. Trees have grown up and died, the field in which the photographer stood is now a young forest, and this morning, as I sit typing, a light snow turns Mink Hill into an ethereal ghost, all but invisible through the luminous clouds which cover it. Someone will live here after us, and perhaps find the photographs that I have hidden behind the walls.

It's been a couple of years since I thought about the black cat who took us for a walk on Monhegan Island. "You are on my path," he said, "and that makes it better for walking. I like the path when we are all on it, when it doesn't matter who is leading and who is following, when it is the same path but it is made different by who walks it with me." I remember how his tail twitched with anticipation. We walked for more than 20 minutes together, and then we went on, and he went back.

In the dead of winter a reasonable person's need for color can become a punishing hunger. We will do anything for a miracle: deny God, force flora to couple with fauna, abjure low-carb food, and grind our thumbs into our eyeballs until our brains seethe with red and violet and orange geometrics. And then sometimes we need to nothing at all. It is like a box arriving in the mail from your mother containing acacia fresh-picked from a tree in far-off California. Late in a dreary afternoon a ragged spray of yellow catches your eye from the distance. Who knows how such a thing could happen. Who cares.

A messy space is a dangerous place.
Vroom, Vroom, get a broom.
Zoom, zoom, clean your room.
Monday morning's brand new face.

I remember having the same feeling when I interviewed Rev. Jesse Jackson during the NH primary back in 1983. Even ten feet away you feel like you are basking in an uncommon radiance, and that pulls you closer and closer until you realize you are being drawn by this attractive power we call charisma, and it is indeed a strange brew of ideas that seem to jive with yours, a sort of pure energy of being that somehow juices your own sense of strength and well-being, and the feeling that somebody who doesn't know you from Adam cares deeply about you, nevertheless. After her appearance just before Christmas for this present primary in our little home town bookstore, I shook Brown's hand and mumbled something about how I hoped she'd keep her voice raised even after she quit the race. But what to do with this vote I have? I wouldn't have given it to her, anyway, but it feels too valuable to give to any of the other characters, and yet I know I've got to do something with it. It's pretty obvious that many of us are looking for some way use our vote to diselect our current regime, rather than to elect somebody whom we passionately want to replace them. And that makes the choice harder than picking your last move in a chess game when you know you are two moves away from being checkmated no matter what you do. You know you've lost the game, but at least you want to go out in style. Tuesday I'll figure out my move, knowing that it both will, and won't, make a difference. But since I signed up to count the votes of my fellow townspeople that night, at least I'll take some satisfaction from having my hands on the raw stuff of democracy for a few hours. Never fear. Your vote is safe with me because the town clerk will make me take an oath before I open the box. I'm not the kind of a guy to defraud the voters. I'll leave that to the Power Guys, the very rascals we're trying to shake out of the tree.

Being tiny has its benefits, and one of those is that you can buy a really big screen TV for about 80 bucks. Little Mikie complains about the reception though, and was particularly annoyed that he was not able to see President George W. Bush clearly as he delivered the State of the Union Address. Not to worry, I told him, you are getting the picture. But it all seems to make sense, he said. What makes sense to Little Mikie is often what makes him feel safe. This is a little guy, afterall, who spent several months as a child protected by ground dwelling bees after falling down their hole. And liked it. His parents, he thought, might want to take advantage of the guest worker program, even if they can't vote for the President. Sure, I said. I've never seen an economy yet that hasn't benefitted from a little legal wage slavery. Little Mikie is too little to vote because of the new law that makes it illegal to vote if you can put your clenched fist through a CHAD without touching the sides. It's a law most of us aren't aware of because we are bigger than that and hardly ever notice the little people anyway. I'd vote for him, said Little Mikie, if I thought he honestly wanted to help people live better lives. Oh, he does, I said. It just depends on which people you are talking about.

Katharine is 98, and still carries herself with the economy and purpose of movement that comes from a lifetime of dance. I met her just a week before she left the old house in the Mink Hills where she and her family have summered for 60 years. She was heading for her other house in Florida for the winter and for the rest of her life. She won't return next spring, and as we walked the land that she had just sold she often stopped to simply drink in the light coming off the surface of the pond, the ridge of the hills in the distance, or the splayed hand of an oak leaf reddened by the fall. I didn't see any nostalgia in her eyes or in her recollections. There are people who nurse their nostalgias for the sorrow that somehow nourishes them in a way that the present can't. But if there was any sadness at all in Katherine, it may have been simply that she would have to take as much of this place with her as she could, and that would be a lot to carry.

When Leah's rat died several months ago I couldn't help but remember, with some pain, the parade of animals that has passed through my own life: dogs, cats, chickens, raccoons, parrots, goats, guinea pigs, squirrels, lizards, gerbils and turtles. I have never know an agouti. I don't even know what an agouti is, but I've always wished I could claim that I once had an agouti named Alice. The toughest pet we ever had was a monarch butterfly the kids and I rescued from a tangle of wet kelp on a beach in Maine in the late fall. It was sodden, frigid, but we noticed faint movement in its legs, and I held it cupped in my hands against the wind, breathing warmth into it as we walked back to the house. We put sugar water in a jar lid, and an hour or so later it rolled out its long black probiscus and took a deep draught. We drove home a few days later with it in a jar, and let it loose in our house, where it lived for nearly a month, fluttering from couch to curtain, drinking sugar water, perhaps dreaming of Monterey.

I'm listening. His voice is weary from hunger, but rather than eat he would talk it out, and as he talks he lets slip that none of us hears what we don't already have in our hearts. The dream, he argues, is the raw cloth. I'm still listening, and waiting, stuck for the moment because it seems so familiar, the story about the bundle of sticks, the cloudburst, the odd light for a moment in her eyes. I wasn't there, but I might as well have been. A new shirt, sewn inside out, and folded so carefully that he said it makes him cry to think of it.

Three days of temperatures below zero at night and not much higher during the day. In the morning the sun, rising earlier and working its way north each day on the horizon, sweeps across the stove. That's the same sun that grew the trees we are burning now for heat. We take warm rocks into bed at night, rocks warmed by the sunlight trapped in the wood. Rising in the morning, we put the rocks back on the stove, and load it again with wood. We are conspirators in the heat death of the universe.

So she follows me down the stairs, this young woman, but the only connection between us is that we are both looking for the restroom. The doors are marked without ambiguity, and that's a relief because there seems to be a fashion lately of presenting people with some sort of a riddle on the restroom door, when all we want to do is empty a bladder and get back upstairs to the meal, the conversation, the bar, the music. Let's see, there's one door with an alligator painted on it, and another with a fireman wearing a tutu. Now, which is the men's room? But this one is easy. I open the door marked MEN, and she opens the door marked WOMEN. We step through our respective doors only to find ourselves side by side, staring at each other with alarm. We're in a small, common room, and the only appliance in it is a large white enamal sink mounted in the center with half a dozen copper pipes ending in spigots descending from the ceiling. I think we both had the same horrifying thought for a second or two. O god, a common pissoire. Where is the post-modern Emily Post when we need her. How exactly do we handle this situation. But it's only a joke, and a good one at that. Beyond the sink are two more doors, each marked again very plainly with MEN and WOMEN, and so she and I decide to try again to sort ourselves out by gender, and are rewarded with the comforting sight of the anatomically correct appliances in the privacy of our own appropriate rooms. We finish our business at the same time, flush, and join each other again in the common washroom. We wash our hands in silence, shyly, she on one side of the big sink, and me on the other. She opens the door marked MEN to leave, and I follow through the door marked WOMEN.

Two Chinese musicians were sitting on small chairs in the shelter of scaffolding, playing their instruments. Both were small, thin men in their late fifties, and behind each hung a square orange banner written in Chinese, but with a sentence of English that read something like "I am true fortune telling, most certain for you, also to speak and say english in perfection." One man played the huqing, a vertically-held violin, and the other the liuqin, a small banjo-like instrument. The music cut through the fog of noise in the street like a beacon. They watched the crowd as it passed. Hank raised his camera, but before he could even focus the liuqin player sliced the air with his hand with astonishing speed and authority, shook his head severely and said, "No photo! No photo!" I wish I had stepped forward, at that point, and made an inquiry about getting my fortune told, or read, or whatever it would have been that they do. Would they have been able to see the vision of a woman in a stairwell that I photographed later in the day and who haunts me now because she seems to say both, "This very moment is your church and your world. Come fully alive," and "This is only the smallest part of the barely beginning. Go forward with no thought of what has come before." It may be that those of us who live slowly and deliberately, always a little behind the current, can actually see the tiniest bit of the future always developing in an eddy just in front of us. But to see it is to change it. And if you change the future, are you not changing the present, if not the past as well? Who is the woman in the stairwell? What could she be trying to tell me? How much is there that I do not already know? How much of what I do not know do I need to know?

From the rooftop of a six-story walkup on the lower east side that was once a tenement the skyline of New York seems modest and unassuming. The Empire State and Chrysler buildings bracket a jewel box jumble of more humble structures, and on the evening of New Year's Day, 2004, most of the offices are closed and their lights dimmed. It may be difficult to imagine just what this coming year will bring, but we'll try, won't we, to make it as good as can be. Good for who we are and what we are doing on the earth. Better than ever. Best of the best.

Gang tags are graffittied on almost any wall space, and on most of the local delivery trucks, but much of the neighborhood has already moved into that edgy place where it is clear that there will be no stopping the slide into gentrification. The rougher, ruder and spirited storefronts that bloomed a couple of years ago when rents were really cheap and you could pretty much do whatever you wanted are being replaced monthly by uptown-looking cafes and galleries which draw, no surprise, uptown people, some of whom wear red coats in defiance of the Black Clothing Only laws and pose for photos in doorways. The sign on the door of the corner grocery, the Havana, pretty much tells the tale. "Sushi Coming Soon." Well, there goes the neighborhood.

You could have been in Soho on New Year's Eve, walking with some people from New Hampshire, stopped intermittently by tourists asking directions, looking down the streets uptown to see the garrish red and green neon glow on the top floors of the Empire State Building, and you would have been stopped by a box by a hydrant filled with brand new tin horns and party hats. If that had happened you would have waited while those same people from New Hampshire pawed through the revelers' tools, taking the best of the bunch, and then you would have continued strolling the streets, passing partiers spilled out from tony restaurants onto the sidewalks in thin black dresses and coats and ties, smoking cigarettes and talking on cell phones, and as the hour approached on which the old year was so precariously balanced, you would have wandered down Grand Street, under the banner of lights proclaiming "Welcome to Little Italy" and claimed a table in a little cafe finally to eat gelato and drink an espresso float while the beautiful young waitress patiently calmed the patron at the table next to yours who was more troubled than most of us by the voices clamoring, at year's end, in her head.

Little Mikie showed up a few days after Christmas just as suddenly as he disappeared several weeks ago. I was trying to divine the shape of the coming year in the dirt patterns on the rug, and I realized Little Mikie was in the middle of my field of vision. "Where ya been?" I asked him. He shrugged his shoulders, which, given his size, was a gesture that was easy for somebody like me to miss. "Traveling under the radar," he said. "Where'd you pick up that expression?" I asked. "I dunno," he said. "What makes you talk the way you do?" About that time the cat stretched out behind him and let go a big sigh that was stong enough to flap the bottoms of his pants. He spun around. "It's you, is it?" he said. "We've got some talking to do, you and me, after what happened." The cat didn't respond, but her tail began to twitch. "Yes, baby, we got some talking to do," said Little Mikie, with less certainty. The cat twitched her tail with more feeling. Crissy picked up the camera and snapped a shot.