The Year We All Got Cancer Winter stayed. The April rain so cold it left blisters of ice on an earth as scarred and pockmarked as a landscape mired in war. We waited through the freeze and thaw for some sign from the recalcitrant earth-- anxiety growing with each passing day. The sun was of little use, peeking indifferently through the skeletal clouds, as if late for an appointment on another planet. We had become a shivering muddle-- a people resigned to winter, when we woke one day to wild things bursting. Fields of dandelion and mustard greens and, in the most desolate spot of all, a stand of wild asparagus. first published in Word Fountain