I wonder, after being in Europe for close to 3 weeks now, if I ever really knew what it meant to “relax” before this. The sky is grey and dim, the fog settles on everything, and S and I sleep away the nights in a kind of cat-like, dead-to-the-world slumber starting at about 9 pm.
Sometimes I don’t awake until 930 am!
This is soooo unlike me—always on the run. Always going. Always leaping out of bed in a near-panic, sometimes for no reason at all except that there is something I am supposed to DO (although I rarely remember what). But darn it if I am late for it already.
Now I am in the middle of my usual “crunch time” with the articles…when invoices are due. This is usually grey-hair, nose to the grindstone, beating myself up because I waited until the last minute AGAIN time.
This invoice time? I’ll do it. No worries. And I am. I am plugging away on these articles as if it is the easiest thing in the world to produce 2,500 polished and ready for the editor words a day.
What is going on? Why am I sleeping so much? And why does it feel SOOO GOOD? Am I making up for 30 plus years of sleep deprivation? Am I just now realizing what it means to finally feel rested?
NO stress, no anxiety. Just luxurious sleep, easing into a grey day without any expectation of it getting sunny. And when it does, boy, it is a joy.
I really thought that I would go crazy not seeing the sun. But this is winter, a time for introspection and going within. Maybe one is not supposed to do much in winter anyways. Maybe we are designed for a little prolonged darkness during this time of year.
Today I went for a short walk in the fog. It was beautiful, all soupy and cold and creepy. I ran into three little dogs who thought I was a giant bird, because I was wearing my black and grey poncho blanket and was walking very slowly in the dewy air.
They barked and barked and the two English ladies who were their mums laughed and called out to me. Then they were embarrassed because they thought I was someone else.
We had about two lines of small talk between us, a few giggles and then they went on their way.
I don’t expect to make chit chat with strangers at dog parks in England, especially when I don’t have a dog.
English peeps are friendly, cordial, corteous, kind even. But they are also shy. That is okay. I am shy too. In the winter, that is. All I want to do is be a hermit, immersed in my own thoughts until springtime. Then maybe we will go to Italy, where I hear folks can be a little too friendly.
I walked aimlessly in the park today in the late afternoon and imagined every corner as a scene out of some moldy old book by a long forgotten author living decades or even centuries ago. I still marvel at the fact that that is entirely possible here.
I took a few photos, got lost, slipped in the mud, found my way out of there in the near dark and then went home.
One of the cats was crawling into an Amazon box when I returned and we both got a good laugh out of it, S and I. We had ordered a bunch of stuff from Amazon Pantry, just for the heck of it. Complete English Breakfast in a can for 79 P. Pho noodle soups for 59 P. Stuff like that. The icing on the cake was the box. A cat’s paradise.
We are so easily amused these days.
After the excitement with the boxes, I made tea, cut some cheese (the noun not the verb), spooned out some olives, put it all on a plate and sat down again to write. We took a pic of the cat’s tail still emerging from the Amazon box and tried to get the other cat to come into the living room to play as well. He was being stand offish.
It is dark now. Soon time for a little nosh and laugh at some English jokes on TV. Time to scratch our heads at this phrase or another...Crown Your Puds! and whatnot...
And then to slip submissively into the deep dark corners of our thick quilts and into dreamless, soundless, heavenly slumber.