Madrid? Summer. My last few days there: lovely, warm, sunny, the streets crowded with people out enjoying it all. Women dressed in light, minimal summer clothes moved gracefully along the sidewalks. Plazas filled with folks sitting at tables outside cafés and restaurants, the air humming with the sound of voices, conversation, laughter.
And New England? Let me put it this way. When the plane landed shortly before 1 o'clock Tuesday afternoon, Boston lay gray, damp, with temperatures in the 40s. A chilly breeze blew, no happy people sat at tables outside cafés, no women sported warm weather duds. On the subsequent bus ride, one or two snow-covered peaks loomed off to the west as I-89 neared the New Hampster/Vermont border. The foliage -- only halfway along in Boston -- grew skimpier with the ride north, evergreens predominating, the countryside hanging on to its late-winter look.
And that's been the story here. Cool, gray, the occasional fissure in the cloud cover allowing brief, heart-lifting swellings of sunlight before reverting back to gray. The weather outside's left the house cool enough that I've had to crank the coal stove on both Wednesday and Thursday.
But that's not all. Despite the weather being in a state of denial re: the month, we are only four short weeks from the solstice, and this being way north, the sky here begins getting light at 4 a.m. (FOUR! FREAKIN'! A.M.!) An obnoxious aspect of this of the year that combines perfectly with my body still being on European time. The result: me awake real damn early. The good part: if it feels like I will not be getting back to sleep right away, I get up and get things done. At times a bit disgusted, yes, given that I'd rather be horizontal, happily unconscious. But one makes the best of the moment we're presented with. And there's plenty to be done here between one thing and another.
Tuesday morning, 6:20 a.m.: the trip back's first leg, a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. There is nothing quite like dragging yourself out of bed at 3:45 a.m. This time, though, I'd been awake since 2, my body anticipating a long day of big fun, so that actually swinging my feet out from under the covers to get it all underway felt more like the next logical step instead of blurry-eyed trauma. The cabbie on the trip to the airport remained mostly mum. Me too. Dozed some on the flight. Walked miles through the Frankfurt terminal, dragging one gymbag full of books and a shoulderbag full of, er, books. And magazines. The sea of humanity around me appearing evenly split between Germans and Americans, me feeling the absence of Spanish being spoken the way a tongue notices the absence of a recently-pulled tooth. (A strange comparison, I know, but trust me, there's sense in there somewhere.)
Sat around with a sprawling herd of Americans and Germans, waiting for the flight. Sat around some more. Boarded the plane, took my seat, sat around even more. My neighbor: a teeny, slender, elderly German woman, looking to be in the neighborhood of 80. Hardly spoke during the entire trip, coming out with no more than 25 words during the entire nearly-eight hours we sat together. Sported glasses, a sweet, slightly-strained smile, red, red cheeks, a brown wig. Got up to every hour to walk slowly down the aisle to the john, me (having the window seat) taking advantage of her absence to get up, stretch legs. Her stays in the wash-closets lasted quite a while, ten minutes at times. After which she reappeared, looking a bit unsteady, tottering slowly back down the aisle, to rearrange her pillow, lower herself slowly into her seat. The crew gave her abundant, gentle attention, those exchanges the only time she spoke. She came equipped with nothing to pass the time, she refused the movie/music headphones. A flight attendant brought her two German-language famous-people-gossip magazines, she worked her way slowly through one of them.
At some point during all those hours suspended above the Atlantic, all that time crammed into a butt-numbing Teutonic caricature of a comfy seat, killing time in a big metal tube packed with other souls in the same situation -- nothing to do but work on a Spanish translation of an Ellery Queen novel I'd brought along or watch the documentaries shown on the little television screens several rows ahead (far enough away to shrink the image to postage-stamp size) -- I suddenly sat up straight and found myself thinking I am having a ball! And, scarily enough, meaning it. As in me being alive, experiencing all sorts of adventures, fully aware how packed my life is with good fortune, what some might call luck. Call me pathetically simple-minded, but there it is.
This being alive thing: it's a hoot.
[continued in next entry]
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Shortcut (in full blossom) -- Montpelier, Vermont:
Madrid, te echo de menos.
rws 5:38 AM [+]
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