Eleven o’clock, November 11

The sun is shining through the bare trees outside the Writing Studio and Bait Shop. There was a hard frost last night, and the air is so clear that I feel as if I could see time itself.

All over the blogosphere people are stopping to remember the moment the guns of World War I were stilled. We meant to mark the end of the war to end all wars, and every year we mark it in old graveyards with new monuments to new wars. The hard work of making peace goes on. After all this time we are not very good at that. We’d best keep working at it.

The water knows. It swirls over the rock, goes around it, ripples away, and returns, again and again. Slowly, slowly, the rock smooths. The water moves. The rock cracks. The water returns, again and again. And finally the rock is sand.

Never give up. Never, never, never give up.