An In-Between Time

I lay in bed as morning entered the room, and my first thought was, “What am I going to do with this day?”

It’s an odd question, and surely a luxurious one, but it was accompanied by a fleeting sense of unease, as opposed to anticipation. It seems to me I’ve put a lot of effort into structuring routines at home, inventing a life, constructing some overall meaning and an embroidery of distractions. But then we take a trip like this, a month-long stay abroad, and the whole thing is torn asunder. The patterns are upset, the props are toppled, and what’s portable is peculiarly off topic. Reality is context and perspective, and now I am adrift.

In the earliest hour at the very cusp of dawn when the light is still blue-white, a bird performs an aria, earnest and loud. I’m not one who can name the names of birds and flowers, but this song is distinctive, and I think I’ll hear it in my head forever, and even when I am very old and elsewhere, the audio memory will transport me back to an upstairs room in an Oxford guest house, where the billows of white quilt are piled like snow drifts on my knees, and a day awaits that I don’t know what to do with. Soon enough the baker will get busy in the kitchen of the cafe downstairs, and the smell of cinnamon will waft through the hallways and up the stairs.

From a distance, my life at home looks pretty and precarious. I water plants and begin projects and make plans. I cannot see a progression or picture a panorama. Everything is piecemeal, anecdotal, a series of actions and events that get us through the days but don’t necessarily line up in an overall direction with intent. There isn’t a moment when everything settles, or a big goal is clarified and met, but we tend to things. We don’t entirely make sense but we’re on our own turf. We wing it. We belong.

It’s a familiar framework. There’s coffee in the mornings, digital correspondence, the usual barrage of bad news. There are mundane chores and local expeditions, and the wonder that comes with living at the edge of nature, surrounded by beauty. There are neighbors and friends and ways to be helpful and long walks in the back country. There are glimmers of irrational joy but also the shadows of worry, a dry wind that smells of smoke, a dying tree, a relentless push for development, the knowledge of all being tenuous. We feel ourselves aging. But all in all, we’re busy, and thus life is lived.

Here, uncertain of my role and out of my element, there is a bit too much time for contemplation. Monte and I have good talks as we walk through town and along the river, and our funny little grandson delights us, but the in-between times must be filled—though maybe not?— and the life at home placed on hold, and it’s best not to fret about it. Fortunately, I can marvel at majestic trees and sit at a red table at a sidewalk cafe and walk along a forgotten path to an old chapel and smell the river and rain. A feast of details fills the spaces and my heart overflows with gratitude, and I’ll never understand why I have been so extravagantly privileged to bear witness and partake.

And maybe that’s all one can do in the in-between times. Bear witness and partake. Gratefully.