day one

Here we go: I offer you a set of five days when the most trivial detail will have to take center stage (they are my last five days of the semester and they are bound to be almost completely overwhelmed by work).

DAY ONE (Today)

We wake up to warm fog. Not even pictorially pleasing fog. Gray, wet, dark fog.

 


The kind you know won't lift on its own, not today, not ever (you get that touch of resignation on days like this). The kind where you have to keep the lights on all day.






I do have a self-indulgent yoga hour early in the morning (my yoga buddy kept me on schedule with that one -- I may have stayed home without the gentle push). After -- breakfast. At the kitchen table. The honey tones come from, well, the honey. And an overhead lamp.





And then? The only, THE ONLY other pause for me was a late walk to the new orchard. Ed had designed yet a new protective cover for the young fruit trees and he was anxious to show it off. It was a beautiful set of minutes. I can design dinners,  courses to teach, I can design trips, I can even, sort of, design book projects. But Ed's designs are always ideas in the making and he improves and perfects them with a patience of a sculptor who chisels for years on hard stone to get the shape just as he or she imagines it on that day, only to be changed the next.






The wind picks up a bit and the clouds seem less dense, less soggy. I can't believe we are in the third day of December.

But I can't pause for long. These are days where I need to clean up the ship -- finalize the courses, respond to infinite student questions, set up another infinite number of office visits, write exams -- so I return to all that and DAY ONE ends with a simple meal of eggs and spinach and a salad. About as throw together as it gets around here. Let's see if DAY TWO will offer something more delectable.