Rainy Day
What do you do on a rainy day? I read, try to get caught up on social media stuff, posting my products for sale. We did go out today to pick up the t-shirts I recently designed. They are whimsical – sizes 3 to 5/6T (so for ages 3-6) – with a baby bird and some fun doodles around it with the message “I’m just a young ’un!” Early feedback from the design has been positive, so I hope I can sell them. But this isn’t meant to be a blog about what I am selling, so let me redirect.
I am reading a book by Alice Munro. While I am not typically a fan of the short story format, I adore Alice Munro’s writing. Her uncomplicated prose, which always manages to make me smile in recognition of some universal truth that is well known but typically deeply hidden, is what makes her stories so accessible. We found a copy of her book “The Progress of Love” as a remainder item from an Edmonton library. It’s not in the best of shape: the spine has detached from the pages and there are some gouges in it, but who cares? The book is so good. Nice, too, that her stories are set in Canada (typically, Ontario, and Victoria and Vancouver, BC). Munro takes the small details of a routine, mundane encounter and manages to impart them with a weight, an importance, a solemnity, that makes a person feel okay with having a normal life. A quiet life. A messy life. Well, and life is messy, isn’t it? This is my newest mantra. When you have a bad day, or week, or month, or year (does this sound familiar to anyone? any 90’s sitcoms popping up in your head?), you can just remind yourself that life is messy and get on with the business of the day. I read quite a bit of this book today. It was a very rainy day, and a chance to actually rest for a change. A sort of forced rest, since if it’s sunny and it’s the weekend, I’m out there with my camera on the trails, looking for birds.
Back at it tomorrow. Hope to find the thousands of snow geese reported to be just east of Calgary. Fingers crossed that we find them! We may get lucky as migrating birds tend to hunker down on big bodies of water when the weather is bad. With luck, they will still be around tomorrow.