This morning at 2 AM, a hand shook me. Three times. Either God calling Wake up! or my husband was tired of my snoring.

I got out of bed, drank water, talked with the son IMing in his room, pulled out a volume of the encyclopedia and sat in the big chair, one cat over my head, the other soon to be parked in my lap.

W and V and U. (I browse books backwards.) Read about wood, wood sculpture, wood warblers. Tennessee Williams. Vermeer. John Updike.

Wisconsin. Venezuela. United States of America. Grant Wood. Wisteria. Vegetables.

Did you know Uranus the husband of Gaia lost his genitals in the ocean and thus gave birth to Aphrodite? Uranus the blue blue planet has many rings and satellites? African wood carvings are stable, forthright, and treat the frailties of women?

The pictures were good too: scallions, spring onions, bulb onions. Samples of spruce, fir, mahoghany, pine, cherrywood. A Muench wood engraving. A Velazquez painting with him at work on a portrait of the king and queen, shown framed in a tiny mirror, while the princess, her maids, the dog, the “court dwarf”, a nun, all in the foreground, look on.

The king and queen so tiny and static. All the life in the onlookers and the painter himself.

My eyes watery with strain, I returned to bed at four. Neither God nor spouse disturbed me further.