Being Sunday

It´s Sunday afternoon in Moratinos, one of my favorite times of the week. The sky is a perfect, clear blue. Mass is ended, we´ve gone in peace back to our houses, our lunches, our afternoon naps. Nothing is moving.

There´s no plowing or chopping or baling today. The hunters finished up about noon, about when the last wave of morning pilgrims moved through. Most of the manure-spreading was finished up on Friday, and it rained briefly this morning. Every breath now is saturated with that fertile dung funk.

Out on the patio Murphy dozes in the barn doorway. Una is twitching, dreaming in her personal sunbeam. Bob the Canary, struck dumb by his annual molt, looks like something the cat dragged in... his head is half-bald. (I wouldn´t sing, either, if that happened to me every September.)

I´ve found a nice thriller novel to read through the weekend, sent on by Deirdre the Pilgrim: "Winter in Madrid." It´s in English, even! (At Paddy´s advising I am taking time off from Las Normas de Trafico. I don´t miss it.)

We experimented with eel at lunch -- lots of meat, but even more bones. The Rueda white wine was good and crisp with it. I need to wash the dishes, and peel and chop and freeze the big bag of carrots on the table´s end, but right now that looks like too much work.

Paddy naps on the sofa. A lizard darts across the kitchen roof tiles, over and under, over and under... he must feel like he´s at sea. An silent airplane draws a straight white line across the sky, way way up. Dave the Dove sings his love song.

I sit in the sunshine. I think about what I´ll do if I learn tomorrow I passed the driving test. I think about what I´ll do if I learn I didn´t pass. Then I let it go.

I have an email from the ladies at the Amigos del Camino Headquarters in Logroño. They probably want me to go somewhere rugged and be a hospitalera for a couple of weeks, right away. Tomorrow. I will answer them tomorrow.

I think about September, how bad things tend to happen then: invasions, hurricanes, fathers dying, maniacs flying airplanes into tall buildings (on a day with a sky the very same perfect blue as this), Fashion Week, a new TV season, plagues, and a general "return to Normal" with the end of summer. I wonder if I should maybe wait til October to take important exams in foreign languages. Then I let it go again.

Wasps buzz around the watering trough.
A rooster crows. Bob sings a note that sounds like a question.
A breeze rustles through the upper branches of the spruce tree.

Nothing more.