That which I should have done, I did not do.

Home. I have been trying for five minutes to write a sentence about the weekend that doesn't rely on a meteorological metaphor, but no luck. So rather than make you stand downwind from the swirl and howl, I think I will just hang out with it in the dark for a while until the horizon clears.

You see what I mean?

I started a long post on Thursday morning, about what it means to travel away from my children, but I can't seem to find the thread of it now. Maybe in the morning.

Before I left Chicago, I had a little less than an hour to make a pilgrimmage to one of my favorite paintings, Ivan Albright's "That Which I Should Have Done, I Did Not Do (the Door)." I fell in love with this piece on my first trip to Chicago, over ten years ago, where I spent two days—nearly the entire trip— in the Art Institute. The painting looms like a wraith, like a Dickensian spirit dispatched to warn you away from regret. To stand before it is to stand in your own shadow, to be haunted by your own unlived life. Is it a coffin, or a door you could still open? An epitaph, or an entrance? You decide.

It isn't just a painting; it's a reprieve.

Somewhere in the swirl and the howl, that which we should have done, and are meant to do, is calling.