How to live at 6:40 a.m. How to keep your house hushed. My phone is yet asleep, if not quite dead. Out there, garbage collectors keep banging cans so loud, cleaning up after the spoilt sleepers they secretly hope to wake. —I identify with those garbage men.

Wake up, beloved litterers of my life!

O, I long to tell a Fairy Tale. It is a true one. Not to give away the end, but most of the best fairies die. I want to tell about our crowded hearty “Before.” It will, I hope, outlast my pals’ more recent spindly “After.” Now we have floated to smoother waters, a continental divide, the “After After” of this plague. From here, to me, “Before” looks even holier. We were children. We thought no one had ever been wilder or smarter than we.

My boys and girls were gorgeous, strong-backed, impenitently sexual, ambitious, irritating, adorable, high-energy, lost and found then lost, the best hopes for our passions that now seem so antique—painting, writing, composing.

Don’t worry: I can still be amusing. They always liked that in me.

Even their sadness often happened very funny. Disaster never rushed you from the direction that you bravely faced. It played too well with you. It did play very rough.

Look, I’ve squeezed this juice, for us alone. Such a color! Let me pour yours into Granny Halsey’s only leaded cut-glass tumbler not yet broken. With your permission, and in your warming company, may I award myself a morning off? A whole one, too. No changing sheets. No dealing with the parents. No talk of sick, sicker, sickest. Let’s end all emergency thinking. Please.

I inherited those crystal pendants there from Robert. I strung them in three eastern windows that’d feed them each dawn’s best. I cannot say I bought this house just because its kitchen faces sunny-side-up; but the brilliance of those crystals has become, for me, our Robert’s own.

I’m now an early riser. One blessing of the plague—I need less sleep. Even when I try to force myself to stay in bed, I wake by sitting upright, feeling stressed but needed.

I rest here with my coffee in night’s final dark. I wait for day’s first color. My hot mug, caretaken, is circled by two hands merely warm but still glad to feel useful. I welcome light. I dare it not to come.

You may think me superstitious. (Oh, by now I’ve grown quite pagan!) But, some mornings … I speak to hatching prism brilliance. There’ll be a first wink, usually redness, then an almost-comical glimmer, all points. —“Well, star, hi. Look at you, back everywhere. RobertRobertRobert.”