I had learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them.

∆ Joan Didion, from The Year of Magical Thinking

We take one step at a time when we leave a love, a job, a belief after spending days, perhaps months, years dismissing doubts their presence, ripples in the air that can be as soft as moths wings we pretend are only the ordinary in and out of our breath clouds against windows clear, and one day we see our world differently feel our hands press against that glass the cold of it flinging us back one last time into the heart of a home we have known where each piece in its usual place seems rearranged as if we are already gone.

∆ Sandy Shreve, Leaving, Belonging (Sono Nis Press, 1997)