Such Days

Such days, such perfect days! The morning light alone as it pours thick as honey through the window pane! How can we not thank God every minute of our lives here? 

Here is a passage from one of John Updike's stories about a bot sick in bed as a child, seen through the eyes of the man he would become. All the longing for that simple time, all the gratitude in it I feel too right now. Bittersweet!"He had awoken with a sore throat and stayed home from school. Ferguson, turning the newspaper pages, heard the child’s mother mounting to him with breakfast on a tray and remembered those lost mornings when he, too, stayed home from school: the fresh orange juice seedy from its squeezing, the toast warm from its toasting and cut into strips, the Rice Krispies, the blue cream pitcher, the sugar, the japanned tray where his mother had arranged these good things like the blocks in an intelligence test, the fever-swollen mountains and valleys of the blankets where books and crayons and snub-nosed scissors kept losing themselves, the day outside the windows making its irresistible arc from morning to evening, the people of the town travelling to their duties and back, running to the trolley the people of the town travelling to their duties and back, running to the trolley and walking wearily back, his father out suffering among them, yet with no duty laid upon the child but to live, to stay safe and get well, to do that huge something called nothing. The house in all its reaches attended to him, settling, ticking, clucking in its stillness, an intricately worked setting for the jewel of his healing; all was nestled like a spoon beneath his life, his only life, his incredibly own, that he must not let drop."Ah! Indeed we must not let drop this life, this only life...