It holds three weeks of daily doses of Losartan, for mild hypertension, and tiny vitamin B-12 pills. There’s no connection between the two—it’s just that both are small enough to fit together in the twenty-one spaces, measuring around three cubic centimeters each. The multi-vitamin/mineral and Omega-3 capsules are too large to fit with the others.

This morning I emptied the last of the small pills into my hand, thus marking another three weeks of life having past, seemingly, very quickly. After conducting my after-breakfast pill-swallowing, I brought the empty box into the room where I store the refills.

Shortly before my friend Fred died last year, I wrote to him that my life seems to pass in three-week increments, measured by the re-filling the little pill box. He acknowledged in his responding letter that he, too, has certain recurring events in his life which mark the inevitable, ineluctable passage from fertilization to stasis (or, ‘room temperature,’ as Fred preferred to say.)

When not in a hurry to get somewhere else in the morning, as I reach for the pill box in my bed stand I pause to reflect on the three weeks just past. Usually, no particular event comes to mind, but I do a mental body-and-spirit scan to see if I can discern being three weeks older than three weeks ago.  I can’t. It is a mystery. It is inescapably true that I have aged three weeks since I last refilled this little box. Yet, I feel no different from the last time I conducted this review.

Now, gazing out the window of my home-office, where I do my writing and pillbox filling, I see the quiet lake welcoming the return of birds who nest and feed and breed here. They have an annual rhythm to guide them, but I cannot imagine they have the capacity to dwell on having aged another year. They are just living their lives as Nature and experience have inculcated in them.

a sunny morning
the birds and I are aging
alive together