For The Love of Mondays

Weekends are always busy around here.  It seems we play catch up with all the big jobs that have accumulated over the past week.  Emery is busy right now getting the gardens ready.  Lots of work, tilling, cultivating and the seemingly, never ending battle with grass and weeds.  Come Monday, the world around me slows and I like that.  Breakfast to be made, hot cereal bubbling on the stove.   A fire to be built in the stove.  Wood to be brought in for the day.  A bit of a morning rush...then, as the chores are complete and Emery is off to work, there is just the steady tick tock of the mantle clock and the clicking sound the wood stove makes as its iron heats up.  There are robin songs outside the window and some cooing from the white winged doves.   Hot herbal tea sits near me as I knit some on a corded bracelet I am making.   The warmth of my old and faithful over sized shawl, crocheted so many years ago, sits on my shoulders.  Beside me the bookcase, old friends, sit on its shelves.  Should I read or knit ?  I plan on both.  Finish my knitting and then spend an hour or so caught up in the "Yankee Storekeeper".  A fun book to read, about a kind of people I understand and relate to.  Yankee blood runs deep through my veins.  For a moment I get lost in the beauty of the quiet, and just look out the window, smoke from the stove, curling and swirling in the cold morning air.  It amuses me.  A dance of smoke against the blue sky, entwined with bare tree branches.  I live my dream life every single day and that is wealth !  This morning for fun, I wore two different colored socks, because I could and no one would care, but it made me smile just to do it, to step outside the expected norm.  There is one blue and one red, same pattern on each, but one from each pair.  Silly, yes, of course.  A bit of the mindset of, “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”  ~Thoreau~
   I had to take a break here and go feed the hungry stove some more wood, this time big thick logs, the kind that last for hours.  The scent of the Maine Balsam incense pulls back in time, a memory of being 15 and dreaming of a life lived in the Maine woods, in a log cabin, content to imagine myself going "woods crazy" and living off the land well into my 90's.   I used to sit in my room as a teen, burning balsam incense to try and capture a piece of what I imagined my future to hold.   I don't live in a cabin and not in the woods, but I have the pieces of that dream that really mattered.  Being able to live a life of simplicity, of embracing some of the "old ways" that I value and being able to grow my own food, not be tied into being dependent on so much of what other folks are.  I like that life goes on much the same way no matter if a storm blows out the electricity and being able to wash my clothes in soap I know whats in it.  I like knowing my lettuce I had for lunch has not be genetically altered.  I love the peacefulness of Monday mornings when I can sit back and take the time to appreciate all that we have in our life.  Not only in the way we live, but for all the love and joy we have, due to the choices we have made from the day we became man and wife.