7:22 am
I’m tired this morning, but it’s a quiet tired – a calm tired. The sun is hitting the bedroom window with more than a little love; the rest of the house is a haze of redirected sunlight, blue skies peeking through curtains and whispering, “Good morning, good morning, good morning.” I want coffee. I shuffle to the kitchen, searching for last night’s sleepily-discarded slippers as I go – the days are warm, but nights and mornings leave the floors deliciously chilled – and I fill the kettle. I stretch, muscles yawning. First my arms, out to the sides, then above my head, then clasped behind my back. Then my neck, rolled lazily from side to side, backwards and forwards. Up onto my tiptoes. Back down to the flats of my feet. Roll each ankle. Roll my shoulders. Roll my wrists. “Wake up, wake up, wake up,” they repeat. Mornings are for repetitions.
8:34 am
I’m sat at my desk, organizing my day – my dandelions-gone-to-seed thoughts – and working out what needs to be done before the weekend. The windows are open: I can hear the birds that love our lilac bush around the back, and the soft, rhythmic jingle of a dog’s collar as they lope past the house.
10:46 am
My shower was a glorious and sunlit experience. I will never again live in a house without bathroom windows. I’ve pulled on my favourite, softest pair of jeans; I’ve given the bathroom a quick wipedown (something Julia of @itsblitzzz on Instagram and YouTube does every morning, and a habit I’m trying to form); and I’m back at my desk, one leg tucked beneath me in my usual perched position with a fresh cup of coffee at hand, patiently sorting audio files for a project. I was sitting on my deck a moment ago: I basked directly in the sunlight and felt my everything – absolutely everything – improve tenfold. I’m not meant for grey climes. I appreciate you, sunlit and storming prairie summers.
12:06 pm
My mood is high and cheerful but I can tell it’s the end of the working week. My attention span is short, my focus scattered at best – dandelions spring to mind, again – and my brain isn’t moving at its default fast. I can’t seem to keep my attention from wandering. But it’s a malleable wander, if I were to name it. It’s unusually easy to rein back in.
2:10 pm
A project I’ve been working on for the last few months is finally ready for release. I’m excited. I’m feeling, more and more these days, that learning and researching and educating is just precisely where my soul settles into growth, easy as can be.
4:28 pm
It’s nearly the end of the work day – or what is supposed to be the end, anyway – but I’ve fallen into a ‘would love to redecorate the bathroom’ situation (I need a bathroom plant. Need one.) and now I’m down the rather glorious rabbit hole that is trying to find a new shower curtain. I’m feeling rather partial to something white with a fruit pattern, but the ones with boobs and bathing ladies are speaking to me, too.
5:23 pm
It’s muggy outside. The air is thick, and fills your lungs with lilac bush and garden soil – it smells like wet and it feels rather like the first breath of air you take after stepping off of an airplane after a ten-hour flight. It began to spit at me while I was mowing the lawn, the wind pulling at my clothes and branches pulling at my hair, but I won the race against the sky.
7:16 pm
The sky has started rumbling. I’ve just made a fresh cup of tea and I’m ready to sit down with a book – The Goldfinch, I think – but my june eleventh daily june post needs to get finished first. It’s cozy tonight, darker than usual for this time of the day at this time of the year, with storm clouds dancing outside and a companionable quiet with my love on the couch beside me. I feel at home with these lightning-lit prairie skies, with the shaking of this little house in the aftermath, don’t I?
8:43 pm
June eleventh is officially up, the sky has returned to bluebird blue, my tea has grown cold and I need to add ice so that I can pretend iced tea was my intention all along, and I’m about to curl up in my chair next to the window with The Goldfinch. Writing every day has stretched muscles that have been out of use for a bit; they’re sore, but pleased. I can taste the words on my tongue, again. I’m looking up definitions as I attempt to use language that has grown unfamiliar – and yet, it feels just the same. It feels like I can’t recall why I ever stopped.
the living hours 