With the onset of early middle age, certain of my senses have improved. I see better than ever before (even as the glasses I buy are more expensive than ever before). I smell things that I couldn't in years past: that tangy, bitter aroma of our garden's tomato plants as they struggle to make fruit, the odors of a neglected bathroom that doubles as a slopsink and washing station, the burnt butter in the iron skillet that my husband uses to make his version of home fries. It's all revelatory for me. Between bouts of digital neuropathy, chronic poor vision, tinnitus-compromised hearing, impaired olfactory sensors and indifferent taste buds it's rare to have my all my senses working adequately all at the same time. There have been exceptions. To this day I am attuned to a baby's wail, or any house sound that resembles or is a person coming through a door or window. Otherwise, each and every one of my senses has presented me moments of gobsmacking bewilderment as they fade in and out of utility.
So, it's Saturday morning. I have been home alone for 3 days. Virtually the only calls I get are from a collector for a bill I have absolutely no intention of paying. I do my chores, I read one of my favorite writers, Richard Price, (which makes me think of reading Richard Ford again, or Reynolds Price), I have seizures of mucus-snorting, spit-flecked glee as I consume TBogg and his brilliant commenters riffing on Paul Ryan with the help of T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Dr. Seuss, Shakespeare and Walt Whitman! (Oh. My. Stars.). I work. Always rushed but seldom interrupted. I look at my house in ways that one can't when there are others living there. I even cooked because even I, as much as I don't want to cook, don't like to cook, can't see why one would spend so much time making something that hours later is going to excreted as waste from one's body -- even I am not going to make dinner from crap I could buy at the nearest corner store. (I have some pride, people.)
It is lightly raining. This is Irish weather -- cool, grey, wet. (The husband's down in Brooklyn having flashbacks.) As far as I'm concerned it is perfect. For years summer was always a season I had to endure. It's hot, it stinks, my bathing suit's always too smalI. (For some reason I'm acutely aware of the alcoholics on the Green during the summer. As I wait for a bus home I watch. In no time comes the face, sometimes young, sometimes old, or made old, that is lividly red, tight, puffy so much so that even the lips are permanently engorged as if if they carry a collagen chapstick. The face of someone who is drinking themselves towards cirrhosis.) I live for the fall. Each night progressively cooler than the one before. The leaves turning, the humidity receding. The ritual of children (and adults) heading towards school. I love it all.
So, it's Saturday morning. I have been home alone for 3 days. Virtually the only calls I get are from a collector for a bill I have absolutely no intention of paying. I do my chores, I read one of my favorite writers, Richard Price, (which makes me think of reading Richard Ford again, or Reynolds Price), I have seizures of mucus-snorting, spit-flecked glee as I consume TBogg and his brilliant commenters riffing on Paul Ryan with the help of T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Dr. Seuss, Shakespeare and Walt Whitman! (Oh. My. Stars.). I work. Always rushed but seldom interrupted. I look at my house in ways that one can't when there are others living there. I even cooked because even I, as much as I don't want to cook, don't like to cook, can't see why one would spend so much time making something that hours later is going to excreted as waste from one's body -- even I am not going to make dinner from crap I could buy at the nearest corner store. (I have some pride, people.)
It is lightly raining. This is Irish weather -- cool, grey, wet. (The husband's down in Brooklyn having flashbacks.) As far as I'm concerned it is perfect. For years summer was always a season I had to endure. It's hot, it stinks, my bathing suit's always too smalI. (For some reason I'm acutely aware of the alcoholics on the Green during the summer. As I wait for a bus home I watch. In no time comes the face, sometimes young, sometimes old, or made old, that is lividly red, tight, puffy so much so that even the lips are permanently engorged as if if they carry a collagen chapstick. The face of someone who is drinking themselves towards cirrhosis.) I live for the fall. Each night progressively cooler than the one before. The leaves turning, the humidity receding. The ritual of children (and adults) heading towards school. I love it all.
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