I Song of the twenty first century

I woke up this morning feeling like Whitman. I-song and such, though the sky is low and spitting rain. Outside the kitchen window the maple has turned red, and the ivy that climbs the back fence. Everything is changing again, and I see, in the lines in my face, in the slight bits of grey at my temples that I too, am changing. Downstairs, the children are asking for breakfast, and it is somewhere between receiving the grocery list and the people to call about the gutter that I forget about Whitman, about reshaping the contours of the world, or even this day. I button a coat. I fix a sandwich. I wrangle and hector until they are sitting in the car. 

In Trader Joe’s, I buy a box of dark chocolate covered oreos that I love. Perhaps this is the I song of the twenty first century, buying a box of cookies, taking it home, and sitting on the couch, eating one after another, in the dim light given off by the lights of the tree. Soon the box will be gone. Then the tree. Then the whole season itself. I can feel it in my bones that things are always changing.