It is the 4th of July--still. Just as it was when I wrote my morning rambling about McDonalds. I have had a wonderful day of solitude, reading, writing, and listening to the background sound of patriotic music on NPR. I'm sending you a short poem by Mary Oliver that Dominique Browning uses as an epigraph to one of her chapters:

THE USES OF SORROW

(in my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me

a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift.

Mary Oliver