Saturday, May 6, 2017

The neighborhood is wrapped in fog. Anything that can be seen is gauzy and indistinct, and there is no sign that an ocean exists. I am sitting in our grey living room listening to wet car tires and bus sighs and a ticking clock on the mantel and the sound of the cat's claws picking at a window screen. I don't know what we'll be doing today, but I daresay most of it will require lamplight.

I am weary this morning . . . partly because it hurts to sleep on my yoga-injured hip, partly because I am exhausted by Republican malice, partly because being fog-bound is soporific. I have been reading Offshore, a beautiful tiny novel by Penelope Fitzgerald about living in a shabby houseboat in the Thames, and I am imagining I would have slept much better last night if I'd been rocking back and forth on a tidal river. I have always wanted to sleep in a houseboat, and to sleep in a Pullman car, and to sleep in Heidi's loft in the Alps. Do other people also have lifelong fantasies about lovely places to sleep? Or am I the only one?

1 comment:

Ruth said...

Oh dear friend, NO! I love the chances I get to sleep on the enclosed porch listening to the Parker River in Newbury and the times I've slept.....really slept in Franconia, and in Paris, and in Aurora, NY, and.......oh so many other lovely locales. I recognized that sleeping in a home/not home is so very, very odd.....have done that while my house was being built.........HARD, but you WILL be in again, a place that IS....simply IS.