Friday, November 04, 2005

I miss that old dog

This is my favorite time of day -- freshly showered and the sleep is out of my eyes, I can barely remember the dream I just had about being a robber, and I'm sitting on the (vacuumed) living room floor with a cup of Cocoa Spice tea. Today's high is 70 degrees, tomorrow should be even warmer, and I'm already starting to harbor fantasies about crawling Central Park with a picnic blanket and a basket of cheese and raspberries.

Robert and I had talked about going out of town for the weekend. Last fall, we drove out of the city on a Friday afternoon and four hours later ended up in a little town called Fleishmann, staying at a ramshackle house that turned out to be a "pet-friendly" bed and breakfast. We were the only people without a barking dog and a man down the hall walked in on us in bed but what I remember best of the weekend is the hike we took through the woods. Rob had chosen it from a book of possible "family hikes" nearby and he picked this one for its level of difficulty (the highest) and its length (8 miles) although, he swears, he did not choose it for its name: the Oscar the Grouch Hike.

I have this image of him running up through the rocks in his bluejeans while I stood by the rivulets of fresh stream water and checked my pulse and decided, right there, that it was time to take up an aerobic endeavor. We got lost three hours in but it was a beautiful day. Found again, we ate Mexican food at one of two restaurants in town and drank Negro Modelo straight from the bottles. When we got back to the B&B, rain was pouring down outside and we came in, up the stairs to our room, and made love before we fell asleep at eight-thirty.

He is sitting at the kitchen table as I write this, talking on the phone into a headset, and staring at his computer screen. His work is not going well at the moment (or all the week's moments) and so we will be here tomorrow and Robert will go back to London early on Sunday morning. I will have to make a point of not having good food in my refrigerator and fruit basket when he leaves because if I do, I will eat everything I have. That's what happens when he leaves. Crazy, huh? It used to be chocolate and cereal although a few months ago, in London, he left for Russia and I stood in the kitchen eating pasta sauce out of a jar thinking about my old dog, Shady, who had a similar problem with food and one time we came home and found that she'd eaten a half-pound bag of whole wheat flour. Strange how sometimes it has absolutely nothing to do with taste and everything to do with having company.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home