Elsewhere Today

I try to find some virtue in this day, conversing in a meeting, packing lunches, and tonight's activity, but I cannot. I am elsewhere today and these small circles frustrate me. I think of a life in which I do something else --- perhaps have my own family, write for a paper, or freelance development - - and work in an office right off a front porch set in the countryside, where I pull on an over-sized fisherman’s sweater and read and write with a bowl of soup, yes. It’s not hard to imagine. I’m a independent spirit and the simpleness of my day would be satisfying.

These are the days that exhaust me, the days when alternate lives seem to step out from behind every tree; these days when they look good to me. Even with the smell of the soup, the soft hair of my dog, days spent in an office with plastic looking wood I think. Then I feel like an animal in the zoo, pacing back and forth, and I look for the things in this life that would look so good if it stepped out from behind a lodgepole pine and whispered to me as I walked home to my fisherman’s sweater and my soup.

I remember though the laugh of The Boy and the Christmas cookies, the dog at my feet. I snuggle into the memory.

But the truth is, I am elsewhere today.