A Day In My Life
…. begins with Cassie, an exuberant beagador (half Lab, half beagle), wanting outside! and then breakfast from the least comatose of us, which will be my husband, Alan. Most days, after I stagger to the kitchen and revive myself with coffee, I drag myself to the gym for a water aerobics class (sometimes the water is actually slightly above freezing). The instructors are great and indulge the class by playing music from the mid and late seventies so we can sing to distract ourselves from shivering while we hop, skip and jump doing cardiac exercises that we definitely handled better in elementary school gym classes. Water aerobics are supposed keep us healthy and also leave us beautifully toned; I’ve only been doing this for twenty-six years so I’m sure that beautifully toned effect will be showing very soon.
Once I’m home, I head to my writing room with another infusion of coffee. My computer desk is in front of a large window so I can see the six raised beds of our vegetable and weed garden out in the sunny part of the yard near the roses.
To my right through a door onto the deck are pots filled with red and pink impatiens, geraniums, big yellow begonias, sky-colored lobelia, tiny stars of alyssum and marigolds. A big, multi-armed bird feeding station and several birdhouses are farther out in the back yard, while hummingbird feeders and flowering pots hang in the lowest branches of the Chinese elm that towers over the house and deck; we brought that tree home, bare root, in the trunk of our car, close to forty years ago. Now, like the family we raised here, it’s fully grown, and three beloved grandchildren have played under its shelter. Our son died in 2019, and we miss him daily, extra grateful now for the beloved family we still have.
I spend the day writing. I try not to be distracted by phone or email—or Cassie, especially when I’m working on something new. When a book is coming out there’s a lot of work expected on publicity and marketing and sometimes it’s difficult to balance that with focus on the new project—which I most love to do—and often the new work ends up on the back burner for a while. What I didn’t do today—again—was work on my next novel. But I think that’s the life of the writer now, back and forth between working on something new and what we do to help bring our books into the world.
By about 3:00, Cassie starts to get impatient. My husband comes home from his photography studio around then. Anticipating his return, Cassie will already be impatiently nosing my left arm, making it impossible to type. If I put her off much longer, she puts her front paw into my lap and jams her head between me and the keyboard. I give up the fantasy of finishing what I’d hoped to, and we load her into the back seat of the car, drive the two minutes it takes to get to the nature preserve near our house where friendly off-leash dogs are accepted if they’re under good voice command, which Cassie is, sort of. What she’s actually commanded by are tennis balls. Obsession is the only word to describe her relationship with them.
In an empty field that stretches out before the trail into the forest, Alan uses a long-armed “flinger” which chucks the ball way farther than even he could possibly throw it. Cassie charges after it at top speed and then, still running as if her tail’s on fire, tears back to Alan, drops it at his feet, and—here’s the bad part—barks sharply for him to do it again. And again. And again. And again. I could keep going with the “agains” but you’d be bored out of your mind way before I finished.
Alan throws the ball in every direction, each time, reminding her “quiet,” and waiting for her to stop barking before he throws it again. (I have great concerns about how this is accelerating our hearing loss, but he’s determined.) This proceeds until we’re in the woods and he’s throwing it ahead on the trail, and finally, multiple times, into the river where yes, she’s an exceptionally strong swimmer and goes crazy with excitement, constantly begging him to keep throwing it in again, again, again. (You get the drift now.)
After the hike, maybe a glass of wine, talk, and some music out on the deck with Alan. Then, after debating whose turn it is to cook, somebody makes dinner while we catch the evening news. The other cleans up. Ideally, I mean, on that “clean up” part. My standards might be somewhat (exponentially) higher than Alan’s. Then maybe a book club or other meeting for one of us, or an episode of a something streaming on TV. Recently we re-watched all seven seasons of The West Wing, astonished
at how prescient that series was, and how appropriate for 2024. Always, always, finally, an hour or more of reading—for me, a literary novel. I count it an excellent day that includes contact with a family member like my daughter, one of the grandchildren, or my sister. The day circles its tails and settles to sleep for the night with Cassie having done exactly that first, everything—at least for a few hours—in place.