This morning I went outside to cut some roses for my dining room table. I spent the first fifteen minutes snipping off decayed blossoms, deadheading. Several of the blooms had one, two, or three petals, still vibrant in color, still clinging to the hip. Some were nestled cheek by jowl with tight-in-the-bud flowers-to-be. Others were the sole occupant of a lonely stretch of stem. In neither case could I bring myself to end this small burst of deep pink. Later, when the wind and rain have battered them naked, and the sun has shriveled them dry. Then, will I return and snip the branch clean.

I cut two stems of rosemary and a single rose. They sit by me now, on my right hand. The rosemary stalks curl upward; the head of the rose nods.

Yesterday while stopped for a red light I glanced up at the sky. The setting sun shone from behind passing clouds. Spokes of sun framed the largest cloud, like a Russian icon. The stoplight changed and I drove on, only to pull off the road moments later. Bumping down an unpaved sidestreet, I chased clouds the color of pewter and tarnished silver.

The trees cleared and I stopped the car. For long moments I watched. The distant sky still a deep blue. In the foreground, a series of pale puffs formed a stately procession, emerging from the trees, marching across the horizon as majestically as elephants, and disappearing behind the skeletons of houses-to-come.

In the middle distance, two clouds linked arms and embraced. In each, a small opening through which poured burnished bronze, ruddy with the day’s last glow . As they pulled apart, the small opening elongated, narrowed, and, finally, became two.

Today driving home from dropping off son the elder at school, I passed a house with a fresh coat of white paint. Adorning the rail of the porch was a row of white pots, each with a bright red geranium.

Later, on the way to Starbucks, I passed a house with purple shades, the color of the stripe on Senatorial togas.

This morning I dug out a bottle of face cleanser I hadn’t used in a while, the one I can’t buy any more. A creamy foam that left my face feeling smooth and clean.

I squeeze out one of the last drops of a sample moisturizer, the one I haven’t bought for myself yet because it’s forty dollars an ounce. The fragrance is “pamplemousse,” French for grapefruit. It glides over my skin, leaving a citrus perfume in my nostrils.

I open the bottle of my favorite body lotion, the one they’ve discontinued. I put a small dollop of “bergamot coriander” on my wrist and transfer it first to the other wrist, then to my temples.

I go to the kitchen to make myself some tea. Earl Grey. Hot.

Last weekend husband and I watched “River and Tides,” a film on the work of artist Andy Goldsworthy. Twigs, leaves, icicles, and thorns. Water and stones. These are the materials of his sculptures.

The icicles and leaves last but a few hours in the sun and wind. A fistful of crushed rock explodes into color as it hits the surface of a mountain stream, then is diluted and washed away as the river continues its journey.

The cairns, the stones stacked in the shape of an egg, a “seed” he calls it, are more durable. At times, though, he builds them on the beach at low tide. He waits nearby, to view and document the arrival of incoming water.

The work was not made to be destroyed by the sea, however. It is instead a gift to the sea. “The sea has taken the work and made more of it than I could have ever hoped…”

The real work of art, he says, is the change. The transition from one ephemeral state to another.

He pulls reeds from the ground, each stem blackened below the point where it was still surrounded by earth, where the contact between plant and earth has changed the plant. Evidence of heat.

Spring, he says, starts deep in the ground.