The day I had the first mail about Jenna I got a black eye. It was a logical response to the situation--good friend--editor! in the hospital, people trying to stay hopeful, indications bad. I'd worried about Jenna ever since her first trip to the E.R. Full of life, full of strength and energy, for Pete's sake she played volleyball, she was all right, she had to be. A bad day got worse and, anxious and preoccupied, I slipped going downstairs in the dark in my socks. Didn't look so bad at first but as the week went by it spread and makeup didn't begin to cover until late in Week Two and it was only a coverup; it's been three weeks plus now, and it still shows.

I will spare you the analogy. Instead, here's this: Jenna was an orphan, who--yes, wanted babies, loved our dogs, liked hanging out in our kitchen with us and Ellen and Rob, borrowed a hat from me and over our last long lunch together talked about her hopes and discontents and possible futures, maybe she'd go back to school and write and maybe she'd study design and make wonderful hats. I said she could do anything she wanted, but with my fingers crossed--for luck, maybe, and maybe because I wanted her to stay where she was, at Tor/Forge, because in addition to liking Joe and me as friends, she liked my work. She fought for it with all that strength and energy I admired and we'd done well together, Jenna and I, and we both wanted that to go on and on and this is one analogy I will not spare you. I am the orphan now.

One of our last conversations was about the verse she sent at Christmas with Rob's winter photograph, because it made clear what she was born to do. I told her she was a considerable poet and she needed to forget the rest of us and our needs and go and do that and as I'm guessing it's not reproduced elsewhere in this book I'm going to type it in now, with love, because it says more about Jenna than any of the rest of us can.

At year's end, it begins again:

The earth turns
and we turn with it,
knowing we are vulnerable
and knowing that is one thing
we may never change;
knowing that may be for the better

And at the center of the circle,
the eye of the storm,
the halfway point to anywhere,
us:

We hope for a white Christmas
and hope for some good news
and hope this will be our year, our time,
our best and luckiest and most--
what it will be
is what we make of it.

These cold winter nights are precisely drawn.
We find ourselves at the window, sitting,
a cup of tea gone cold, forgotten,
a hand idly resting on a lover's thigh,
poetry half-read, or perhaps only half-written;
we hear the brave wind crying as we cannot bear to do
and the trees' glass-coated branches rattling,
armored yet helpless,
fragile, beautiful, patient,
reminding us who we are, and who we might be, reminding us:

It begins again
at year's end.

Kit Reed, kreed@mail.wesleyan.edu