A certain spectrum...

And so I begin again.

It has been months since I've done anything with Xcargo. I have some excuse. As you know, we moved to New Mexico this summer. My mother had a stroke—a second one, actually—and my father is elderly. Someone had to be here. And that was me. Or, rather, Martha and me.

If circumstances were different, if we came for other reasons, we'd be quite happy. Martha was retiring from Tufts, anyway. What I think of as my career is entirely portable. I can do it via computer and the web. Our son is now going to school in Virginia. There was, in short, increasingly little to hold us to Massachusetts. Why stay and fight the winters?

Thus, we came, and we are glad to be here. Or mostly so. The qualifier of the mostly being, of course, our motivation. The reason for our coming. The illness. The stroke. The slow and incomplete dying of the brain.

Alas, you see, the quality of contentment has something of the nature of physics. Between the quantum of the consequence and the shimmer of the cause, there is a certain spectrum which, like the rainbow, is constructed by the breaking of the light. Or, if you prefer another metaphor, one taken from the falsity of vacuum, then consider the virtual pair. Whose life is beautiful but brief.

Begun in nothing. And ended there.