Oct. 16, 2010  The Thing Is  by Ellen Bass  to love life, to
love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything
you've held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your
throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its
tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for
gills than lungs; when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body
withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your
palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you
say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again.  "The Thing
Is" by Ellen Bass, from Mules of Love. © BOA Editions, Ltd.,
2002. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)  It's the birthday of
Noah Webster, (books by this author) born in Hartford,
Connecticut (1758). He's best known as a lexicographer and a
spelling reformer, and it's his surname that makes up half of
the title of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. He came from a
landed Yankee family and went to Yale.