It ain't easy being carefree
It’s the sort of summer when you stop paying attention to the weather forecasts. They never seem to get it right. As I flung open the kitchen door this morning to push out Lucy the dog, who needs to be presented with a fait accompli in order to get up in the mornings, the sun shone brightly on the rainbow of roses that my husband and I had planted on the sandy hill. It’s interesting that when the sun shines despite the weather forecast, you don’t ask yourself where the clouds are. They’re just somewhere else, and here on my Swedish island during this short respite of light that we call summer, that is just fine.
There are always a hundred things to do here, but the wonderful thing about mornings in this place away from the gaze of schedules, is that you can ignore all of them and do something else. I started by counting the number of rose varieties that my husband and I had planted during all of the years that we had worked on this impossible project. By the time I counted thirty-five, Lucy the dog sat staring, drooling for breakfast amid the roses on the largest bed. She’d have to wait another minute, since my thoughts had wandered to the thistle, which too were flowering. I began to notice that there were hundreds of tiny flowers on each thistle head, something which had not gone amiss on the bumble bees, which rushed frenetically from one sweet flower to the next, like children in a candy store. The lavender were blooming too and I checked to see whether there were any in my pockets. Noticing that there were none, I picked a few and stuffed them down. No one’s pockets should be without lavender sprigs during the summer.
At the dock, I picked up the book I’d left there on the day before. There is something carefree about being able to leave your book on a chair at the dock and know you’ll find it there dry and untouched on the following day. I opened the book to where I had left off and read a couple of pages. I looked up across the water toward the horizon. Here there was time to think about what one had read, read it again, and see it from yet another perspective. If only there was a way to take this feeling of space and time with me into the working year. Life had meaning when we gave ourselves the time to discover it.
Lucy the dog refused to accept that her breakfast was one of those musts that could be ignored on this carefree morning. Her dark brown eyes with the sultry, blond lashes stared at me as I turned the pages in my bubble of liberation from duty. Then a fish stirred in the water and her attention was diverted. Lucy could never resist the fish that nipped at the surface. They seemed to her one of life’s great mysteries, which she was determined to unravel by watching them for hours on end during these lazy days.
With Lucy now occupied, I laid down on the dock, warmed by the morning sun, and stared at the sky. Lying there, staring at pure sky without limits, time or onlookers, was to me the greatest of life’s luxuries. The skies had no plans written in them, no matter how much the tabloids liked to insist that they did with their 14-day prognoses. There were endless possibilities there at all times. It was only we who chose to see sun or rain.
The strings of a guitar sounded out the open window. My son had awoken and was doing whatever struck him first. I was glad that he knew how to be carefree. It was one of those things that might protect him in life.
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Rose in the Sand available at major online bookstores now
Julie Lindahl’s new book, “Rose in the Sand,” is now available at major online bookstores in Sweden and elsewhere, including at www.amazon.com.
