It's deep gray this morning, and my plants and I are waiting for promised rain. So far, it's only come in such light drops that there aren't even puddles forming. I'm usually a morning person, but except for putting on a wash [I just broke off to dry them], going for a focused grocery run, and making distracted mistakes with wordle and quordle, I haven't been able to settle into something.
Yet I've had that opening line on my mind for hours now. I wonder what it is about the urge to write that washes into you, until you abandon everything else on the list. (Though there is the silence, too, when no words come.)
Last week, I had new windows put in the house; they are bright white emblems of what I need these days...a new view on life. In a few days, I'll be traveling west again for sort of the same reason, a change of scene and heart. Old friends to see, places to return to or rediscover, new routes to try out of the familiar. Melding the past and the present, those days away dig themselves in and out of sorrow, a release, a pleasure. A spur to engage the future.
Like those windows, it's mostly the same landscape I see through them, but by a new configuration, a new brightness. The season helps. Spring leaves things underfoot, as it opens up all the color and beauty we have been missing on the barren ground. Walking along the front slope, I see flowerings I forgot were planted there...or perhaps they arrived on the wind. It's a haphazardly growing slope, but I enjoy the surprises there. And in the one sunny spot, at the end of the driveway, daffodils threw themselves up brilliantly. Though most are drying on their stems now, I've still got one pot bright.
The back fence garden, on the other hand, is being newly, deliberately laid out (too early for surprises yet), and so it is, in fact, a new look. I'm enjoying that, as well, seeing its length not as one long outlook but as separate images through one back window after another. The surprise there is that, though I didn't plant it with those individual views in mind, it just came to be that way.
My new windows have only one drawback...they've run away with any far travel this year. Still, it's worth the sacrifice, not only for new ways of looking out, but for the satisfaction that I'm helping ready the house (and myself) for a new stage of life. Whenever it happens to come for me.
