Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants

Tag Archives: Sunshine

The sun’ll come out. . .

Tomorrow.

I’ve been singing that for about a week.

Unfortunately.

It sticks in your head.  Along with visions of little red-headed orphan girls.

It’s a horrible song—of immense popular appeal.

(It should be noted that its horribleness is not due to any intrinsic compositional or lyrical flaws.  It’s just that it will not go away!)

The thing is. . .the sun may or may not come out tomorrow.  I don’t know.

I do know that it came out yesterday.  And it’s out today.  And. . .yay!

Because it was getting very, very depressing.

It is truly fine for it to be gray and gloomy in the north.  It’s the paradigm for the fall.  But this is the Sunshine State.  Got that?  Sunshine.  It’s in all the ads.  So I expect. . .you know. . .sunshine.

Not only do I expect it, but I need it.  We have to decorate the dock.  The Boat Parade is coming.  Not for about a month, but still.  When the boats come by, we have to have the lights up.  And I need sunshine for that.  Not warmth, necessarily, but sunshine.  It’s very difficult to get in the holiday mood when it’s all foggy and misty.

Dock decorations are hard enough.  One year we tried for a New York skyline, but you can’t make a good corner with a rope light.  It put a damper on our creativity (to say nothing of a vaguely pornographic twist on our Empire State Building), so we’ve given up murals.  Now, we just try not to fall in the water as we’re stringing the lights up along the roof and around the pilings.  We have acquired a nice lighted peacock lawn decoration this year—although possibly not for the dock.

Peacocks are big in my family.  My grandparents used to have a bunch of them hanging around the farm.  In fact, their descendants are still over there yelling away, wandering the highways and byways.  And all of us have various vases and umbrella stands full of feathers.

That’s another little miracle.

You can just walk around behind a peacock in the late spring, early summer, and pick up those beautiful works of art.

So, I’m delighted to have this light-up bird.  I look forward to seeing him twinkle away.

But, I’m more delighted to have some sunshine. . .and I definitely look forward to the voice of Li’l Orphan Annie fading off my internal audio track!

Bet your bottom dollar.

A breeze and some sunshine

And humidity under 80%.

I had such a nice day yesterday.  Didn’t get much done, but that was part of what made it nice.

First of all, I overslept—which could, of course, be a disaster if there’s somewhere you have to be, but I did not have to be anywhere.  For me, it was a surprising blessing.

We moved here because of noise.  One of the things I particularly hated about the noise was I never got to wake up on my own time.  I had quit my job, and I thought I was entitled to revert to my natural rhythms.  Left to myself, I want to stay up until about 1 or 1:30 and get up around 8 or 8:30.  I had the staying up part down, but big crashes and stomps above my head were never going to let me sleep in.

So, we moved.  At which point, I found myself going to bed at around 9 or 10, exhausted from all the new things required of me by the new house—by owning a house at all.  And I was waking up by 6, if not at 3 or 4.

In an odd, inverted way, it reminded me of this little stanza by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Grown-up

Was it for this I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight?

All of that is kind of beside the point, however, which is that I overslept today for the first time in years.

That put me a little bit behind, but I got my workout in.  I used my new nut catcher to round up some sweet gum balls, and I used some Round-up to—I hope—discourage the sweet gum seedling that is trying to grow up in the middle of my labyrinth.

And then, I did nothing.

I just decided to put aside the multiplicity of imperatives that are usually buzzing around my head and only do things I enjoy and that I wanted to do.

I read a book.

Then, I realized that the weather was gorgeous, and I took my book out on the dock.  The sun was shining.  The breeze was blowing.  The humidity had dropped to around 70%—which is low for here.

I realized that almost all of the days I like to revisit in my memory have been days like this.  A Girl Scout camping trip to Cape Henlopen.  An afternoon in a hillside cemetery in Nevada.  A Connecticut meadow.  A cookout in Indian River involving a 50’s style motel, a swimming pool, and The Music Man on TV.

Nothing much happening.

Just sunshine and a balmy breeze.

The days when you have all the time in the world, and you hope time never comes to an end.


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