Two week ago, or nearly two weeks ago, I picked up a book. I was at the Salt Spa and I had brought something with me to read, but I didn't feel like reading it. This book was on the shelf, so I picked it up. It was pure, unadulterated mindless entertainment, really perfect for a period where I was supposed to be resting and breathing. At the end of my session, about an hour later, I was half-way through the novel and I took it home with me, not because I planned to finish it at home, but because I wanted to be certain it would be there at my next appointment.
That was the day I realized I was retired. That day I realized I could sit in a sunny chair and read a frivolous book if I wanted, that my time was mine to fritter away as I pleased without repercussion. When I hit a slump, rather than turning on the TV or turning to the internet, I picked up my book and finished it that afternoon. There was no blood and guts, just a well-told story, with characters broadly drawn but engaging so that the reader could fill them out in their own imagination (as is the point in popular fiction). In short, I enjoyed my brief foray.
Over the following week I read two more books in the series, one when my back was sore, another when I found myself unable to focus on knitting while watching TV and therefore growing restless. Like eating a bowl of ice cream, or sorbet in my case, these novels have proved to be enjoyable little pleasures, not necessarily memorable, but no less enjoyed for their lack of nutritional value.
I have the fourth book in the series, but haven't started it yet. The days since my return from Texas have been full, and full of fun as well as the requisite chores of life. A friend and I went to the opening of the Knoxville Symphony Leagues annual decorator's show house, and I perhaps liked this year's foray more than usual. I think this was due to the format more than anything else. This year the "show-house" was actually three residences in a new luxury residence tower downtown, and each of the two-bedroom residences had a unified point of view and style, as well as spectacular views of the city, and I appreciated that sense of consistency.
Friday I went to Sunlight Gardens up in Andersonville, ostensibly to pick up some Iris cristata Tennessee White, a form of Iris I had been seeking for some time. Of course I bought other plants as well, perhaps a few too many. It is hard to resist plants, almost as hard as it is to resist books. And I am only now noticing, as I add photos to this post, how much pink there is in my garden, not that I have anything against pink.
I did not plant yesterday as it was raining and a bit on the chill side. Instead I tossed a new cloth over the table and played with china and place settings. This Indian mandala print came home with me Friday as well. Actually I was initially wondering if I could make a dress out of it but quickly realized it was large enough to be used as a bedspread or a tablecloth, and perhaps better suited for either. It came home with me because I love it, even though I wasn't 100% certain it would work in my blue dining room, with the blues and greens of my china, and because I knew it would find its place. Of course I shouldn't have worried. Already it has brought me hours of joy, playing with color and pattern and texture on a rainy Saturday.
I spent part of the afternoon, after putting everything away and between other chores, yes they do interfere at times, reading in the sun room. It wasn't sunny, but the beautiful pink azaleas outside my window seemed to glow in the soft gray light. I didn't remember them from last spring, but then I was still in my old house, packing and moving when they would have bloomed.
My current book is Neil deGrasse Tyson's Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. It too is fun, although it requires more thought and attention than Mary Higgins Clark's mysteries.. Even though Tyson is writing about the world beyond my small corner of the earth, he reminds me that these azaleas and I share a certain commonality in the very basis of our existence, and, paraphrasing some theology read and discussed earlier in the spring, we are all just combinations of little bubbles that come together and drift apart, smashing into each other, perhaps joining together, perhaps bursting apart and making something new, but still connected, all of a piece.
