turtle pace

I surely cannot be proud of this day. It fizzled and died on me early and any great idea that I or we had for it was lost in the disappearing hours.

It has been a long and hard semester, but I've had those before and so I can't entirely blame my lethargy on that. Nor on the holidays -- they've been over and done with for three days now. You do not need three days to recover from preparing a meal.

There are the small frustrations -- I could kick those around a bit. Ed has had a stream of brakes to replace -- on his car, on mine, on the truck. During the last weeks he has spent a good part of each day underneath cars, prying apart rusty bits of metal. But why would that have an effect on my level of activity? True,  I've been struggling with my own stream of malfunctions: a broken camera, for example -- which I had sent in to be repaired (under warranty!) and it came back as broken as ever! So there is a bit of frustration there, but hey, days are full of repair troubles.

What's really making me restless is the fact that I read a stack of clippings my mother sent me on a recent book about the political upheaval in postwar Poland. So I've been thinking about that. In the middle of the night, I wake up and want to put down on paper how this all fits into the story (okay, the book) I am writing on the side. You know, the long neglected one -- the one that I have not touched since the semester began.

I'll be in Poland again in just a couple of weeks and of course, this makes me anxious -- as if I ought to now, more than ever, give more thought to how I can use my Warsaw time productively,  even though my time there will be, as always, very short.

So, I wrote all these excuses for a slow day and they aren't especially convincing but there you have it. I didn't leave the house until late in the afternoon and only because I had to -- to supplement groceries for the week ahead. And let me assure you that shopping late on the Sunday after Thanksgiving is especially disheartening, as the shelves are bare and the music, Christmas music, seems hollow and not very convincing.

But, there were Christmas trees for sale outside the store and the smell was lovely.

And, too, even on days when I hardly step outdoors, I need only look up and remind myself that I live beneath the great midwestern sky…

Driving home from the store, I glance out at our lakes. This is part of my world. Amazing.





How could it be this beautiful...





And, to add bounty to the day, my older girl and her husband drop over for Sunday supper. Nothing fancy -- spaghetti all'amatriciana (which has spicy peppers in addition to the usual garlic, olive oil, bit of tomato). Some people would call it comfort food. Okay. But I was comforted significantly before I worked the fork into the plate of noodles.

It was a slow day, but who's to say that a fast paced Sunday is preferable?