It is winter on Harris Creek. For me, winter is that time/space between the beginning of January and the end of February. As a space of habitation it fits the solitary reader like a fine leather glove. The cottage in which I sit reading is real; the cottage evoked by my reading is unreal. The real cottage is contructed, the unreal cottage is woven. Writing is woman's work.

The world evoked in reading covers the real world, it translates structure as texture. The clothes do make the man; absent a face, we have abstraction. The text is a tissue of half-truths and half-lies which covers the real body, lying upon its surface like a black widow's web. The abstract alone is real.

My identity is fantastic, woven on a loom of metaphor. That moment when I awakened to myself, that moment when I recognized myself as that face in the mirror, was also the moment I fell into her embrace, and I have found myself there ever since. The body that I call my own, this chair in which my body sits, looking at slowly turned pages, this stucture that keeps my body warm and dry, all of this is, in my experience, covered in fantasy. I cannot separate the fantasy from the reality. They seem to go together.

A beautiful sunrise this morning on Harris Creek.