As soon as I felt completely healthy, I attacked the garden, uprooting the intruder weeds and placing them aside on the compost pile. I felt and gave them a certain reverence, because they would die now. But it was not sad; they would be replaced, and I would uproot the replacements, unendingly, through seasons of living and dying, and they would break down and feed new growth.

I returned more slowly to cutting wood and dragging it back on the home-made sledge to the pile behind the cabin. My muscles were small again and loose, unaccustomed, and I let them build back up in an easy time. Again the piles of wood were growing, the season was good, the plants were healthy, the sun was hot and occasionally it rained, just enough.

The earth drank the moisture, took it down to the roots of the plants, and the plants became greener and fuller, while their time for death approached.

Everything I touched that year was touched with the knowledge of death, and each time I tested it, told myself, “This thing will die, how does it feel, how do I feel?” And each time it was all right, I knew the time would come.

I was more grateful for my body. I protected it and strengthened it, and I watched what it did, thinking, “How simple this is, how lucky I am, it could just as easily be the other way.”

It may seem odd that every year since then, each spring, I have become ill. Perhaps it’s the release into the new season from the draining, sunken concentration of the winter that brings that fearful clarity of fever, so that all the colours are too bright, hurting my eyes, and I have to hold my hands over them because the brightness must be blinding. And the sounds, too loud, the frogs and crickets at night, the birds in the day shrieking, discordant choruses in a language I do not understand; moving too painful, the sheets rough as sandpaper, skin tender, even breathing painful, the air rubbing nostrils raw, going in and out, unstoppable, each breath a small agony. Until finally the pain eases, the light grows dimmer, the sounds recede and I am well again. I can stand, make my way to the kitchen for food and drink, and then outside where it is bright and noisy and not extraordinary, where the sunshine heals.

Each year the sickness comes; perhaps I even make it happen. Because for all the pain and discomfort, it is important at times to see things too clearly, to hear things too strongly, to feel things too harshly. Surely that must be why.