That is Lucy. She was waiting for me to get up on the last day of the year. Those are also my flannel sheets, the orange stripey ones, and my disastrous bookcase. There is Boswell’s Johnson on the top shelf, and Geoffrey Chaucer in blue below, and Andrew Marvell in gold lettering and out of focus on the fourth shelf to the right of Mann’s Doktor Faustus.
And now I’m at work, where really, I haven’t the faintest notion of what I was doing before I left. Really. I suppose I should start by looking through my mail.
It doesn’t help that the cold I’ve been fighting all vacation has settled in my ear, and I can’t hear a thing. But all of us are wandering the halls like stunned people, wondering what the hell it is that we are supposed to be doing.
I stopped on the way in to mail back a few returned packages, and to buy sudafed to attempt to clear out the ear, and to go to the bookstore’s annual calendar sale. I’ve got a lovely pastel of a steamer on a river by Max Liebermann on my wall, now, and I managed to find another Jamie Wyeth calendar, too (I had one last year) — January is a snowy farmyard with geese.
Sudafed always makes me feel like I’m on another planet, even more than being deaf in one ear does.
And I am looking forward to the great organization of 2013. I may start with that bookcase right there.
I’ll let you know how it goes . . .
Maybe be kind to yourself and wait until you are off Sudafed?
Not a bad idea . . .
I have an ear that is almost permanently clogged. It’s completely destroyed when I fly. I hate sudafed – it makes me feel worse, much worse. I hope you feel better soon.
Also: that is a very handsome cat.