Almost on a daily basis, I check out a blog by an English lady who lives in the Piemonte region of Italy. How precisely I found Louise is a memory lost to the split second of a mouse click much like so many other fleeting introductions I've made in this screen-linked life. However, unlike many other forgettable pleased to meet yous, her words and descriptions of Italian living made an impression on me and that, is why I regularly visit her in the virtual manifestation of the home she calls an 'ancient pile of granite overlooking Lago Maggiore'.
Charmingly, she always begins her posts with an update of the day's weather and more than anything else with which she regales her readers of her day to day, this meteorological knowing of her particular geography, places me instantaneously within the same space that affords her a View from Carmine Superiore.
So today, when the weather here in Houston is of the kind that induces a dismal sort of melancholy, I wonder if my telling you that at 7:45 am we are at 58 degrees, that if my saying that it is raining, and that the formerly sunlit dappled leaves of my garden now look miserably soggy in this drizzly rain I wonder, whether this description works for you the kind of location Shazzam that Louise's forecasts do for me. No? I sorta guessed this would be the case. After all, rainy days in Texas cannot possibly hold the imagery-laden romance that a deluge in Carmine would. This is an inevitable truth.
Anyway, moving on, I had a simply miserable night. My little boy is not feeling well and stuffed up noses do not make for his restful sleep. The state of my early morning zombie-ness has everything to do with lack of sleep. The day feels burdensome already for that very reason.
Ever since I was a child, the color of the sky and the ability to experience sunlight has influenced my moods. I've always understood how people living in the sun deprived winters of northern countries could become depressed from having to chip away at their memory stash of a patch of blue sky or the warmth of a golden sun.
I remember reading a story in National Geographic once that showed a group of little Russian children who looked as white as sheet. They were sitting in some sort of yurt, naked but for their underwear in front a large blue lit lamp. This was their sun, their vitamin D happiness, their doomed-to-fail attempt at a tan, their heat and their health all rolled into one. I felt so sad for them just looking at those pictures. I wondered what would have happened to me had I been born to a mother in some light-forsaken country, having to dig up my daily dose of cheer from within the spectral blue of an electric lamp. I'd surely be miserable. As miserable as, for all the obvious and some not so obvious reasons, I feel this morning.
Do me a favor and wish me a nap and some rest. Wish my son's stuffy nose to clear up and his crankiness to morph into his more usually sunny disposition. I cannot muster much enthusiasm to do this for myself this gray morning, and I can only hope that tomorrow will not dawn like my today.
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4:30 pm
Update: I'm having a little glass of port and I'm on my second Newman's Own chocolate cream cookie. The sun has rallied forth in full blown glory and now my son and I are out in the yard enjoying a lazy afternoon. Things are looking up. I never doubted they would.
