Fluid and elastic time

Time is playing tricks with me.  Sometimes, most times if I am honest, my life is the classic plate spinning exercise, running from house and family to holiday cottage to job to garden to friends and wider family, tweaking a plate here, leaping up as one threatens to crash to the ground.  Sometimes I like it like that, sometimes it starts to overwhelm me but always it feels normal.  So why do I suddenly feel to have all the time in the world?

I think it began when I got back from Devon.  Somehow I had slowed down for the sake of a few days away looking at gardens.  You couldn’t say it was an obvious chill out.  I had driven over seven hundred miles for one thing.  But I arrived home feeling like someone with a bit of time on their hands and here at the end of the first week back I am still wafting about serenely.

This is totally irrational.  This week has been full of the chaos which results from the kitchen ceiling being on the kitchen floor and the contents of the kitchen being on the kitchen table.  See previous blogs for photographic evidence.  I have knocked tiles off walls and picked dust out of my hair.  I have worked on two days and spent most of today cleaning the cottage ready for this afternoon’s visitors.  There is just as much weeding as ever.  I went to yoga and to singing practice for the Eisteddfod and I had my hair cut.  Objectively it has been a busy week.  I have not been swinging gently in a hammock, a good book in my hand and a glass of Pimms on the grass.  I have not been idling along a shell strewn beach with flowers in my hair.  And yet I feel calm and relaxed and seem to have found time to cut sweetpeas for the house and make scones and water and feed my dahlias.  I have sown some seeds and potted on my penstemon cuttings and eaten ripe strawberries standing in the strawberry bed in the sun.

And now I think I will wander upstairs and paint my toenails.  Winter and cold will come soon enough and surely at some point the tide of stuff will overwhelm me again but for now let us make hay while the sun shines.  Let’s not ask why I am feeling the sun on my face.  Let’s just turn in the warmth, cat like, and purr.