The Hot Spring

Up the valley the mountain heats its own water: a spring pooling between grey rock slabs, steam standing over it in the October cold. The women of the household I was staying with go in the old way, which is to say entirely, and took me along as if it were nothing, because it is nothing, and everything.

Snow on the peaks, steam on the water, three women laughing in a stone pool at the edge of the inhabited world, glasses fogging faster than I could wipe them. The cold air and the hot water argue over your shoulders and the argument is the entire pleasure.

No photograph of that hour was posed and this one barely counts as taken; the camera sat on a rock and caught what the steam allowed. I include it because this record keeps its keeper honest: this too is research, the oldest infrastructure of all, shared warmth in cold country.