Easing Into Things
Yes, I do know there is a gap of about a year and a half between posts on this blog.
Yes, I have been more or less in hiding.
Yes, I am slowly attempting to ease back into a number of things. It’s a very slow process as the stuff in my life shifts and then shifts again.
I’m having to relearn, yet again, how to live some way other than constantly lost in my own head. It’s hard habit to break. It’s such an old habit, so deeply ingrained.
I grew up lost in my own head. I think I was trying to survive. Except somewhere in trying to survive, I never really learned how to live. And only now, in my thirties, am I trying to figure out how to really live instead of merely survive. Too many days I wonder if it’s even possible now.
And yet I know women far older than I am are walking the same path, unlearning the same lessons so they can learn new ones.
How to live in the light instead of someone’s shadow. How to find a voice so long ago silenced. How to stand alone. How to really truly Love. How to be a whole human being. How to live out all these things so our daughters learn them early.
Feels Like Summer
I know it’s still early June, but when the weather hits 30 degrees Celsius or more and the sky is clear and blue and sunny, it feels very much like summer. Too hot. Especially for a place deemed to be far enough north to render AC ‘unnecessary’ by building code authorities and utilities companies.
I don’t like (and I know I’m not alone in this) temperature extremes. I don’t deal with too hot any better than too cold. I wish it could be either spring or autumn, when the temperatures are nicer and the trees pretty colours.
Being summer and rapidly approaching the Summer Solstice also means much longer days than nights. I think right now sunset is about the time my husband goes to work, around nine thirty or quarter to ten. Dawn is somewhere between five and six in the morning, if not earlier. I remember reading someone’s blog post or email about how they were planning to start going to bed at sunset and get up at sunrise. And I remember thinking about what utter insanity it would be to attempt that here. In the summer, it would mean far less than eight hours of sleep at nights. In the winter, it would mean only being up and active maybe eight hours of the day.
For the moment, it means my daughter, who is still in elementary school until nearly the end of the month, doesn’t want to come inside in time to get ready for bed. It’s still ‘daytime’, even though if she doesn’t come in and get to bed, she won’t wake up in time to get to school in the morning. Or, worse, will be too tired to get through her school day without the school having to call me to pick her up early. (It happens. Oh, the joys of having a child deemed ‘special needs’.)
I’m grateful for the pole fan given to us by neighbours moving out just down the row. It keeps the living room liveable. There’s a second fan in my bedroom which makes it sort of possible to sleep in there if I’ve had a bath or shower immediately before going to bed. I think my husband is lucky in a way… he gets to go to bed after the bedroom has cooled down as much as it’s likely to.
Now to figure out how to feed us all without cooking not just the food, but myself and the house as well.
