Rainy Day, Dubonnet — Sweetly Disturbed

Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years went by without ceremony. We don't have kids, so we hung out, hot toddied, (or rather, hot, mulled wined) watched movies, and fretted over this property we've been trying to buy. Fretted overmuch. The holidays blurred briskly off.

Yesterday, I had a big faculty meeting to start the semester and on the way home, we met in the parking lot of our local wine shop. My husband, a non-buyer-of-flowers, had a bundle of coppery Peruvian Lilies (also known as Parrot Lilies or Lily of the Incas) in his hand. They were on sale at the grocery store, he said.

Their color is Addie's eyes, I told him, and he smiled, knowing it's my highest compliment for anything.
In retrospect, every single thing about that moment is perfect to me.

It's the white sky blues here in Ohio. Or the winter-blahs as beauty magazines like to say. PoppyC. down in the study is making syllabi for Spring semester and finding the irony, once again, in how the whole semester's named for the last and rarest of its weathers.

Outside, rain strikes the top of a catio. Inside, all around, vibrant colored afghans, favorite wool rug, gorgeous felines are washed in the thin, dim light of it. I want to crawl under covers and read, but I am basemented to this chore.

Bored: I take pictures of my glasses, our pets, paint my nails, put on lipstick even though I'm still in my nightclothes. And I get bored, Readers, days like these leech light from my very soul.

Passing my husband in the hall, he asks "when's the library open?"

I walk into the bathroom and see myself in the mirror: the knot-tied ponytail, the vintage spectacles with little stars for screws at their temples, my favorite red lipstick slapped on out of serious boredom doesn't really match the nightdress and cardigan I am wearing. I feel restless, and bored, bored, bored.

When I get bored, I sometimes confuse it for the doldrums, and I sometimes confuse the doldrums for the down-mopsies. And the down-mopsies as we all know, can lead to some serious dark hours of the soul. It's a little path I've walked before. Sometimes in regards to steeped-in-sadness, I've had no choice, but often, I really do.

When I hear the phrase "walk it back" all through our long dark season of campaigns, I always see it as a little rock path, where stone by stone we manage our wobbly way. When I think of the restless->boredom->doldrum->down-mopsies->seriousdarkhourofthesoul. I think Walk it Back, Sister. Walk it back and remember the sweetnessess, the bazillion beloveds that make up every day. The precious precariousness of them all.

Back in my study, everything's quiet, only the softest whoosh sound of the fan from the portable fireplace that I have on mostly for the visual of flames, the mood, and the wind outside between rainstorms. The air is neither warm nor particularly cool, so I have the window to the catio open.

Something in me stops and just listens. If I had an ear to the traintracks of the life I hoped was approaching me some seven years ago, I wouldn't have dared to dream this one. It's a blah day, indeed. But all around me are beloveds. The husband upstairs puttering into the kitchen with his ridiculous pocket labrador shadow. The layers of thrift store afghans that make this room so cozy to me whenever I venture into it. That my life is books, words, and the young artists whom I get to teach.

Some days I forget to remember all that.