the week ahead

If it appears that my days are a stream of good, if sometimes dull moments, I’ll admit that your perceptions are more or less accurate. It is also true that when a busy day throws punches left and right, I falter. It helps to stay steady and calm. And I do try for that.

I don’t always succeed. Today, through bizarre and not readily explainable circumstances, I had a huge work issue fall in my lap – one that will take days, many many days to fix. (It was not of my doing, true enough, though in life that hardly matters – a crisis is a crisis and looking for fault gets you no closer to resolving the problem.)

So I could throw up my hands and hurl nasty words. But that wouldn’t keep the calm that I need to work through this.

All this will drown my next few days with added work. Making up for (someone’s) mistakes takes time.

On the upside – a week from today, I am hopping on a plane and heading out. Not with Ed, not this time, but with good friends from up north. And we’re heading – even further north. I dangle this for you and for myself. It is a light at the end of what promises to be a hugely tedious set of days.

Or maybe not hugely tedious. I mean, what's tedious about this: I wake up, thinking not immediately about the tasks for the day, but about how pretty this December day is. Even though the hose, loosely thrown on the wood-chip driveway should have been put away long ago. And so it's frozen through and through. Maybe later, if the sun comes out, we can attend to it...






Ah, but it’s a hazy, winter sun. Late in the afternoon, it plays with possible snow clouds. Or so we're told by the weather channels.






Sweet, lovely moments. Like the one when I went with a daughter to pick up some chocolate gingerbread cookies at a bakery to the north of us. And took in a whiff of these.






Or, much later, returning home, when I found Ed shoveling out a truckload of chips to build a winter compost mound.

The sun had long set by the time he and I drove to the café. And still, I couldn’t fully unwind then. Emails, damage control, work – all that interfered. But not for long. An hour or so later we were home again. I scrambled eggs and popped some bread into the toaster for supper. And for the rest of the evening, finally, nothing else mattered.