On the way home last night from a lovely evening of books and dinner and drinks with old friends, I felt happy enough about my blue and gold nest with soft sweet sheets and soft sweet permakitten and soft sweet quiet awaiting me. Then I remembered it was peony season and sighed just the tiniest bit. Once, just once, I thought, I’d like a suitor who was the type to buy me peonies. I granted myself one second of self-pity standing in the cold rainy darkness, staring up at my empty apartment outlined by the night sky. Then I stopped at the corner deli and bought $50 dollars of pink and crimson and magenta blossoms–heavenly, heavenly scented and tinted and textured–and came home and filled all my vases with their beauty. There are harder problems to solve–few, in fact, with such joyous solutions.
Dishes are clean, laundry is done, floors are polished, surfaces are gleaming. Permakitten Grace and I are lounging by the open window, basking in the afternoon light, the sailing breeze. I’m reading a Betsy-Tacy book, my jag of revisiting favorite childhood books not remotely over. Grace is perched on the sill, studying the twentysomethings on the street with great interest. Ella’s “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” comes on the stereo, and it feels just right. It’s quite something when you realize the most you can muster is a pleasurable sort of melancholy, an open-ended longing, but that’s 2016 in a nutshell so far.
I woke with the lyrics of “Sometimes It Snows in April” running in my head, and marvelled over how Prince even wrote the soundtrack for our grief. Continue Reading →
On the way home last night from a lovely evening of books and dinner and drinks with old friends, I felt happy enough about my blue and gold nest with soft sweet sheets and soft sweet permakitten and soft sweet quiet awaiting me. Then I remembered it was peony season and sighed just the tiniest bit. Once, just once, I thought, I’d like a suitor who was the type to buy me peonies. I granted myself one second of self-pity standing in the cold rainy darkness, staring up at my empty apartment outlined by the night sky. Then I stopped at the corner deli and bought $50 dollars of pink and crimson and magenta blossoms–heavenly, heavenly scented and tinted and textured–and came home and filled all my vases with their beauty. There are harder problems to solve–few, in fact, with such joyous solutions.
Dishes are clean, laundry is done, floors are polished, surfaces are gleaming. Permakitten Grace and I are lounging by the open window, basking in the afternoon light, the sailing breeze. I’m reading a Betsy-Tacy book, my jag of revisiting favorite childhood books not remotely over. Grace is perched on the sill, studying the twentysomethings on the street with great interest. Ella’s “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” comes on the stereo, and it feels just right. It’s quite something when you realize the most you can muster is a pleasurable sort of melancholy, an open-ended longing, but that’s 2016 in a nutshell so far.
I woke with the lyrics of “Sometimes It Snows in April” running in my head, and marvelled over how Prince even wrote the soundtrack for our grief. Continue Reading →