Winter’s teeth

By Bill Pearse on February 10, 2026 • ( 1 )

On one end of the sky the crescent moon, an earring made of bone
and on the other the rising sun, soft candlelight—
in between there was us, the earth, with all blue above.
Winter’s teeth still on the wind. Birds beckoning for spring. Fallen branches and rocks trapped in the mud.
That candlelight spreads and the whole of the sky is the color of abalone, pink, peach, turquoise-blue.
And with no leaves in the trees all the handmade prints of the branches interlaced against the backdrop of the sky with the light spilling through.
Last year’s leaves in clumps on the ground. Fern fronds pushing up. Knots of moss on the trees and some burls, swollen knuckles. Lichen spray painted on bark.
Never lose your wonder for nature or you will be lost too.

With my wife out of town I could take all-cold showers again and leave the bathroom door open for my grunts to cascade throughout the house. They could probably be heard upstairs where the kids slept too. Though teenagers, and on a late school schedule, and asleep with earbuds, it’s doubtful anything got through. Our youngest had a friend living with us this school year, as her family moved out of state and she didn’t want to switch schools in her senior year, so we agreed to let her take our oldest daughter’s bedroom and live with us through graduation. She can likely hear the sounds I make from distant rooms, but that’s what happens when you cohabitate.

The look of a kitchen when it’s just a single man, living alone. That’s how the kitchen looks with my wife gone now. Reminds me of my uncle’s trailer, back East. The dish sponge dries up fast and it takes days to get a full dishwasher load.

I remember taking meeting notes for my first corporate job when I was just 25. I was so serious about it. Hand wrote the notes, then typed and sent them via email. I brought all the intensity of a journalist to the job with none of the skills or training. What they must have thought of me. The most banal, play-by-plays of corporate team meetings. Who could give a shit.

Now at 55 I’m still getting paid to write meeting notes though I use AI to do it like any self-respecting professional. I download the transcript and upload it to Copilot with a little prompt. It is almost perfect, and all I have to do is read and tweak a couple things. I don’t even need to pretend it’s not AI; I work for a tech company. What fool would make it look handcrafted, and why? No one reads meeting notes anyway. Maybe just the human who ran it through the machine.

They have a saying “human in the loop” to denote AI that isn’t autonomous per se but has some oversight. There is this fear now and suspicion of any AI that’s truly autonomous because it’s not good enough yet to trust it. But it’s getting better every day. They talked a lot about it at Davos and I got pulled back into that doomsday gloom of worrying about the idiot spectrummy white guys who are dictating the terms of the new super intelligence and buying off politicians to stifle regulations. I said to my wife I wonder if I’m going to regret someday working in this industry and she said you’re doing it for your family. Which is just what the chemistry-teacher-turned-drug-dealer Walter White said in Breaking Bad, and look how that ended.