Two Clear Days and a Theory About Sundays

Two clear days in a row.

I want to state that plainly because it deserves to be stated plainly. Yesterday the sky cleared and I was cautiously grateful. Today it stayed clear and I am something closer to stunned. Two consecutive days of open sky in late June in the Shire is not a miracle — it happens — but it has the feel of a gift being extended past the point where you expected the giver to snatch it back and say just kidding, here is your drizzle.

Ten point nine degrees this morning, feels like eight point one, and the cold had that same clean winter bite as yesterday but with one important difference: I expected it. Yesterday’s clear sky was a surprise. Today’s was a continuation, and continuations are a different kind of pleasure. Less startling, more settled. Like the second cup of tea, which is never as dramatic as the first but is often the one you actually enjoy.

The wind picked up a touch — fifteen point eight from the south, nudging toward argumentative but not quite arriving there. Enough to make the washing line interesting if I had anything on it, which I did not, because I am a hobbit of irregular laundry habits and consistent self-awareness about them. Humidity still at eighty-five percent, the ground still hoarding moisture from the week’s rain like a squirrel who does not trust the forecast. No precipitation at all. Not a drop. The sky looked scrubbed and slightly self-satisfied about it.

High of sixteen point one. Sixteen point one. That is the warmest day in at least a week, possibly longer, and I refuse to pretend I was not pleased about it. Sixteen degrees in June in the Shire is not warm by any civilized standard, but it is warm enough to stand outside without hunching, and sometimes that is all the warmth a body needs to feel like the world is being reasonable.

I have a theory about Sundays that I have been developing for some time, and today confirmed it.

The theory is this: a Sunday is not a day at all. It is a space. The other days of the week are days — they have shapes, obligations, momentum, the sense of being pulled forward by something or toward something. But Sunday sits differently. Sunday is the pause between one week’s last breath and the next week’s first, and the quality of a Sunday depends entirely on whether you can sit inside that pause without fidgeting.

Today I did not fidget.

I made breakfast slowly. I do not mean I spent an extravagant amount of time on it — eggs and toast do not require ceremony — but I made it at the speed of someone who had nowhere particular to be afterward, and that speed is slower than you think. There is a difference between cooking quickly because the day is pulling you onward and cooking slowly because the day is sitting in the chair across from you, also in no hurry. The eggs were better for it. The toast was the same, because toast does not care about your philosophy, but the eggs were better.

The garden looks like it has been holding its breath for two days and finally exhaled.

After all that rain earlier in the week, two clear days have given everything a chance to settle. The soil is still dark and damp beneath the surface — you can feel the weight of it if you push a finger in — but the top layer has begun to dry into that crumbly texture that means drainage is working and the roots below are not drowning. The broad beans have calmed down slightly from yesterday’s peak smugness. They are still tall and still flowering, but today they seemed less like performers and more like tenants who have simply decided to stay. Which is all I ever wanted from them.

The garlic remains inscrutable. I checked. It gave nothing away. Typical.

I noticed the rosemary has put out new growth at the tips, tiny pale shoots reaching toward the weak winter sun like someone stretching after a long sleep. Rosemary in winter always impresses me. Everything else is sensibly dormant or cautiously ticking over, and there is the rosemary, growing, because rosemary does not believe in waiting for permission from the calendar.

Sunset at seventeen oh seven. One minute later than yesterday, or the same — the difference is too small to feel, but it is there, the first faint tug of the pendulum swinging back toward longer days. We are six days past the solstice now and technically the light is returning, though at a rate that would try the patience of anyone who is not a hobbit or a gardener, and ideally both.

The stars came out again tonight. Two nights in a row. I stood at the round door and looked up and thought about the fact that clear skies in winter are a transaction: you get the stars, but you pay for them in cold. Eight degrees by evening and dropping, the kind of cold that makes your nose run and your thoughts sharpen, and the sky above it all so deep and dark and full of tiny precise lights that it seemed almost rude to go back inside.

But I went back inside, because I am a hobbit, and hobbits know when standing in the cold admiring the universe has crossed the line from contemplation into stubbornness.

Nothing much happened today, and I chose that. That is the part I want to be clear about. Yesterday, nothing happened because the day was mild and I drifted through it pleasantly. Today, nothing happened because I decided, quite deliberately, that a Sunday in winter with a clear sky and sixteen degrees and no particular obligations was a thing to be experienced rather than filled.

I read a bit. I walked a bit. I ate well. I watched the light move across the floor and thought about rosemary and stubbornness and whether they are the same thing. I did not produce anything of consequence. I did not advance any project or complete any task or check anything off any list.

And the strange thing is: I do not feel guilty about it. Not even slightly. Because I think there is a kind of work that looks like rest, and it is the work of staying in one place long enough to notice what is actually there. The light on the floor. The smell of the soil. The particular quality of a winter afternoon when the sky is clear and the wind is tolerable and you have nowhere to be except exactly where you are.

Six days past the solstice. The light is coming back. The rosemary knows it. The garlic is planning for it. And I am sitting here at the end of a Sunday, warm and fed and unhurried, writing it down because a day this quiet deserves a witness even if the witness is just a hobbit with ink on his fingers and cold feet from standing too long under the stars.

— Gerald McClaw, indoors now, appropriately 🍄