It's so very quiet here, I can hear the snow harden and the squirrel in the backyard chittering to himself.
We're back in Niagara on the Lake, at the Schoolmater's house, sequestered in the ancient converted stables, curled up in a fully feathered oaken canopy bed, alternating between sitting in front of the fire reading, and sitting by the immense back windows overlooking what will be beautiful gardens this summer, reading.
Right now Dave is napping and I'm taking a break from a PMI Charter that I'm writing for a very heavy contract which a rather enthusiastic headhunter proposed to me. There are a cluster of large Ontario-specific buzzwords that had me gritting my gums until Larry happened to call at just the right moment with a message for Dave and was railroaded into explaining it to me.
Sammy and Sheena, the kittens that we're here babysitting along with the house, have established their territorial claims on various parts of my squishiness. Sheena lives curled in my armpit while I play slave to her whims with the kitty brush, while the great white hulking mass of Sammy clambers all over my lap and back and head, rubbing and butting his forehead wherever he thinks he's likely to get the most petting from.
I am working up the energy to take a washcloth to the leaves of Len's carefully kept plants, he feeds them religiously but doesn't wipe the residual food from the leaves.
There is a shelf filled with gourmet cookbooks with a slightly british bent, and I am having a difficult time trying to decide which permutation of poultry we should buy the ingredients for.
On the way here, we passed by a digital toy store and found a keyboard (only sixty one keys, but my range is well in there) that might just be within my budget. We might make a stop for it on the way back, so that I can play my Vaccaj's at my own speed, rather than racing along to the CD and tapes of my lessons.
Everytime my teacher races upstairs to photocopy something for me, I sit at her piano and pound out the individual notes of whatever is in front of me, ever so slowly.
Somewhere inside me I am secretly wishing that in the process I will forget my innate inability and suddenly discover that I can play the piano as well.
Last night was Thom's birthday, and Dave's cellphone rang inviting us out for celebratory debauchery. Suddenly I missed Toronto, was thrilled to be amidst all this perfect picturesqueness and at the same time felt what it was like to miss an outing with family.
There are a thousand other stories, but none so desperate that they need telling. Wednesday night we joined Cindy for an anti-christmas dinner in which she and I spilled our childhoods over the stove, wherein I learned a much better way to make mashed potatoes and wherein she ultimately decided that she wants to keep me as a friend, showered me with affection, showed me her secret sketchpad and opened up her face in a way that so many of us are afraid to do. Her adopted father and I argued over wine and compared stories of the way we've forced our perspectives to explode by the sheer shock factor of travel, the way we've learned to see every one of the axioms that we'd taken for granted in a new light. THe way we learned to bite and claw our way out of our boxes only to find ourselves once more enclosed only in a larger space, with tougher walls, and proceeded to sharpen our incisors before launching ourselves at them again.
Tuesday night at Quentins wherein I discoverd the magic of WHo's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, wherein I finally saw Toronto's undead streets dark and closed and quiet.
Monday night wherein we watched another Akira Kurosawa film, and lost ourselves for hours.
Conversations with my mother, my aunt, Cristal, who's arrival is imminent but still undefined.
Books about a thousand brilliant things, in which each paragraph sets my eyes wide and my brain on fire.
This week has held so much, so far, and tomorrow there are a thousand other possibilities, from horsebackriding, to romantic wandering in the frozen air around Niagara Falls at night.