For a time we were lucky; we still had books and notebooks where we could write a record of the days all day, if that is what we wanted. There was a yard, so we could measure wire and garden stakes, buy soil in bags that we then added to the soil that lay in its natural state around our homes. For this was the irony of the world as we'd come to know it for a very long time: how it was poured out and packaged in parts for purchase, and then even the things we thought we owned were being sold to us. How appropriate that purchase came from the Old French porchacier which means search for, run after, pursue. We'd run out of coin but not out of tears. And there would be no end therefore to our searching. Our hearts gave way repeatedly, as one violent day slid into another as if without separation. And yet we wound and set our clocks. In the dark we listened hard for the bird whose voice we'd heard at that hour in the morning.