The sky is the flat, bright grey of after-dawn, and it is raining hard. Last night, we emerged from the house into heavy drizzle, the kind that hits muggy streets and smells like relief. July has been a bit of a squib after April’s raging sunshine. But it’s a strange and welcome equilibrium; I was getting tired of watering.
We’re in an in-between, caught between locked down and eased up. When we could only abandon the house for an hour a day, we dreamed of this - to drive to the beach, to book a holiday cottage, to have a pint. Now it is here and I can quite easily spend a couple of days festering, not leaving the house, not remembering why I used to. Lockdown has become life, and its bad habits have returned. The odd bit is over, now sit with the inexplicable new reality.
Rainy days in the Treehouse mean a kind of battening down. The lamps intended for evening use (because, after all, that was the time I used to spend here) come on too early. I strike matches and light candles, my toes sit in the grooves made in slippers. We huddle out the day, hours slipping by in which I open the door to the balcony to let the air in, close it to keep out the cold.
M and I have been lucky. We know this and count our blessings most days: health, home, happiness, work to do. Lockdown took the plans from our diaries, the festivals and the weddings and the holidays, all of them in threes, but we gained time in its place, along with an agreement to marry. Sometimes I think about what we’d have lost if these past three months had been spent outdoors and in other places. We don’t have much to show for it - stupid ditties, a couple of new dinner recipes, the small tower of books he’s been making from those consumed during lockdown - but our lives have changed.
A few weeks - probably months - ago, I wrote her about the struggle I was having with getting words out. But that wasn’t entirely true: dozens of them were arriving every day for the features that pay my bills. Now I realise that the languor has swallowed a deeper thing, not words but ideas. Those I have are slow and stubborn to germinate. A few hours ago, because I’ve not slept long, M said that I needed to roam, a concept that seems almost abstract now.
It’s frustrating, of course it is. I grasp onto the wrong things, flirt with them for a while before settling them down back in the box. For now, I count blessings. I read, and I write, and I get woken up by the rain. The roaming will come. Seeds need patience to germinate.
