It seems to make the walk go faster, when you’re on a treasure hunt at the same time. The air is warm and the sky is the sort of mottled white and blue that means it will probably be overcast by evening, though it was sunny for awhile this morning. People are out walking, with their dogs or their walking sticks or their baby carriages. We saw a family bicycling and children out playing soccer in the schoolyard. Martin’s list today consisted of:
- a flag
- something yellow
- a woman in a garden
- something that’s not the color it used to be
- new leaves
- a ball
- someone you know
- something shiny
- something that makes you laugh
- a street named after a tree
As usual, he found half the items before we left the neighborhood, and the thing that made him laugh was finding out as we neared the end of our walk that OUR street, Platanvägen, is named after a tree: sycamore! đ
We saw little bright clumps of snowdrops along the snail trail and in gardens, and we saw ground-cover buttercups; a bright yellow like tiny circles of sunshine dropped glowing in the grass. I saw one willow with new pussywillows behind the daycare and all the winter moss seems to have covered everything and is greener than ever. We heard birds chirping and chattering to one another high up in the trees, but no crows in the woods right now. Usually you can hear their raucous cawing all over the village, but maybe they’re not back yet from their winter holidays.
The kids were up bright and early, much to my groggy dismay this morning, since I was up later than normal, having actually sat down and watched part of David Letterman and part of Conan O’Brien; a rare occurence as I usually go to bed to read well before they’re scheduled. Instead I went to bed to read AFTERWARDS which meant that by the time I turned off the light, it was well after 1 o’clock.
I can’t fall asleep reading. So many people I know confess that they can’t read in bedâafter a page or two they’ve fallen asleep, often with the book over their face. Martin routinely falls asleep with large, heavy hardcover books perched precariously on his chest. I suspect that the reason we so often find his bedside lamp relit late at night after we’ve turned it off is because he was startled awake by a book dropping on his nose in the middle of the night. But I’ve never been able to fall asleep reading. I get more and more tired and my eyes get blurrier and blurrier, but I always have to consciously STOP and mark my page and put the book down and turn off the light, and even then my mind is often still caught in the story for a long stretch afterwards until it slowly relinquishes hold and lets me slumber.
It feels like a restful weekend, with things to do, but none of them pressing and fun events on the agenda, and walks and some shopping and some errands and lots of time for winding down and getting little things done that have been put off for awhile, and reading, of course, always reading.
*Lily Tomlin