She rolls the scrap notebook paper into a long cigar, lighting the end as if to smoke it. Instead, she sticks it inside the wood burning stove, taunts the meticulously placed splinters of wood with its flame. You know you want it…
And the other cigars of notebook paper turn orange with joy.
“Cobíjame,” she thinks and smiles at the use of her new vocabulary word. It’s the little things, really.
Placing trust in the existing orange coals and the licking flame, she adds three logs to the fire, closes the squeaky door and opens the flu. That should do it, warm these frigid bones and relax these shoulders held tight by the cold. She sits on the wooden floor near the stove, thinking for a second that it might dirty her pants but reassured by the fact that the “empleada” had been there that day. The empleada leaves everything spotless. Hell, even rearranges the furniture in her bedroom when she’s not asked to.
She opens the book she’s started to read. A book by Thomas Wolfe, not particularly grabbing thus far but supposedly a classic so she’ll stick to it for a while. At least it could help revive her English vocabulary and advanced sentence structure which, using English only for basic communication lately, has gone to shit.
But rather than dive into the story and forget herself completely as she once did so easily as a child, she “reads” a paragraph, two three paragraphs, and in the middle of the fourth sea of words she stops, no idea what she’s just read. Why is the fire not hotter? How nice it is to have the house to myself, nobody to bother me, time to relax and read…
Ironic?
And why am I still cold?
She looks in the window of the stove and there are no flames. Coals adorned with cold logs. Damn it. Put the book down. Go outside, get smaller wood. Take out the big logs, put in the smaller ones. And she realizes with a smile she had smothered the delicate fire.
Ironic?
Rather than try to resume her absentminded reading, she reflects. Two months she’s been here. She has two authentic friendships in town. She stays busy. She gets enough sleep. She maintains contact with her people from home. Why the sudden imbalance? Why the urge to be alone? Because she hasn’t been able to lose herself in a book, she hasn’t been able to play outside in the sun, and she hasn’t been able to take time solely for herself.
She knows herself and is familiar with these feelings; they come not just because she’s in a foreign land. She recognizes them, lets them have a visit, comforts herself with the knowledge that she can kick them out if they overstay their welcome, not invite them back for a while... At peace now, she replaces the half-charred logs that she took from the stove on the now blazing fire and picks up the book. Where did I leave off?
And the other cigars of notebook paper turn orange with joy.
“Cobíjame,” she thinks and smiles at the use of her new vocabulary word. It’s the little things, really.
Placing trust in the existing orange coals and the licking flame, she adds three logs to the fire, closes the squeaky door and opens the flu. That should do it, warm these frigid bones and relax these shoulders held tight by the cold. She sits on the wooden floor near the stove, thinking for a second that it might dirty her pants but reassured by the fact that the “empleada” had been there that day. The empleada leaves everything spotless. Hell, even rearranges the furniture in her bedroom when she’s not asked to.
She opens the book she’s started to read. A book by Thomas Wolfe, not particularly grabbing thus far but supposedly a classic so she’ll stick to it for a while. At least it could help revive her English vocabulary and advanced sentence structure which, using English only for basic communication lately, has gone to shit.
But rather than dive into the story and forget herself completely as she once did so easily as a child, she “reads” a paragraph, two three paragraphs, and in the middle of the fourth sea of words she stops, no idea what she’s just read. Why is the fire not hotter? How nice it is to have the house to myself, nobody to bother me, time to relax and read…
Ironic?
And why am I still cold?
She looks in the window of the stove and there are no flames. Coals adorned with cold logs. Damn it. Put the book down. Go outside, get smaller wood. Take out the big logs, put in the smaller ones. And she realizes with a smile she had smothered the delicate fire.
Ironic?
Rather than try to resume her absentminded reading, she reflects. Two months she’s been here. She has two authentic friendships in town. She stays busy. She gets enough sleep. She maintains contact with her people from home. Why the sudden imbalance? Why the urge to be alone? Because she hasn’t been able to lose herself in a book, she hasn’t been able to play outside in the sun, and she hasn’t been able to take time solely for herself.
She knows herself and is familiar with these feelings; they come not just because she’s in a foreign land. She recognizes them, lets them have a visit, comforts herself with the knowledge that she can kick them out if they overstay their welcome, not invite them back for a while... At peace now, she replaces the half-charred logs that she took from the stove on the now blazing fire and picks up the book. Where did I leave off?
