Thursday, December 01, 2011

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...


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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.


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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.


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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.