Relative Something

In the middle of my solo escape to the lake, I find myself thinking about how I can most fully absorb the pleasures of these agenda-less days. When I am tasked daily at home with duties, the dream of having nothing pressing me into an activity grows and grows. I long to have no reason to get out of bed and to pick and choose what comes next by whim instead of by the hour on the clock. An hour, by the way, that has once again shifted disorientingly forward to DST overnight. Ugh, I say, and I don’t even have any schedule that needs to be upheld today.

Looking back on the already vanished last two days of luxurious solo pursuits, I fear the benefits of getting what I so dearly wanted are disappearing without my fully appreciating the greatness of the moments. Today, I plan to see if I can improve on that perception.

There is a herd of deer wandering the grounds that I have enjoyed seeing each day. I counted seven yesterday in the middle of a sunny afternoon. From the obvious pattern of their heavily traveled hoof prints in the snow, it appears they have a much more set agenda than I do.

I made my way to our mini labyrinth in the woods and reclaimed the pathway with my own footprints. There was no sign of wildlife traffic in that area.

No, the deer have been walking right past the house along the ridge above the lake. One or two of them had approached the house to nibble on the branches of one of the landscape shrubs.

I took a few pictures on my walk yesterday morning when the temperature was still below freezing. There was a striking difference in the texture of the snow where shade had kept it all wonderfully powdery, as opposed to the hard crust more prominent everywhere else.

Later in the day, the clouds broke up, and the sun kicked up the amount of melting significantly.

My slow, aimless wandering was one of the divine pleasures I want to deeply appreciate in its contrast to strolling along with Asher, which is more my norm.

Oh, my. Look at the hour. How can it be this late already? Oh, yeah. That.

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