Day 104

The circle of Life

A beautiful cool morning.  I decided to run in socks.  Yes, socks!  My ankles and knees have been painful and I thought that perhaps my hiking boots are the culprits.  I have read that running barefoot is better for you unless your feet pronate terribly.  There is a group of people who run in Somerville, all along the streets, completely barefoot, and an fb friend's husband is training for a marathon barefoot.  So, I can't run barefoot in the meadow because of ticks, but I wore some old socks and it felt wonderful!  Of course every time I rounded refrigerator corner my feet got wet but it didn't matter.  I ran 1.39 miles (2.23km).

Tufted titmouses are all courting, with the strangest little songs which I haven't heard before, and I'm not sure which sex is being flirtatious, but I observed one titmouse frantically beating her/his wings, and then flitting about, up the tree, lilting from branch to branch, and then back down the tree, alighting only for a moment on each twig, lower and lower, with two other titmouses in hot pursuit, a song and a dance!

I was cleaning the counters in the kitchen this morning and found myself singing Shout very loudly.  Last night Nick's a capella group sang this song at a concert at the school and it was beautiful, Nick being the star singer.  They also sang Loch Lomond and Fix You, which both brought me to tears.  Why are some people so pathetically sensitive while others go through life on a much more even keel?  I remember my friend Trish being so impatient with me when I cried at sad or sweet or solemn things.  I had a beloved record that I always listened to, with The Count of Monte Christo on one side, and Paul Gallico's The Snow Goose on the other.   In the latter story, Phillip Rhayader is an artist who lives alone in a lighthouse.  He is wounded in body and spirit and loves a young girl, Fritha.  When Phillip shouts her name into the wind, "'Frith!  Frith!", I would always dissolve into tears, no matter how many times I had listened to it before, it was just so terribly terribly sad each time.  One time we were listening together, and when Phillip cried out "Frith!" Trish cried out "Froth!" and we both collapsed laughing!

But to go back to singing in the kitchen, it is amazing how many times we fill silence with music, either music out of speakers, or music out of our mouths and lungs, old hymns, tunes we learnt when we were children, songs we love now.  My mother would sometimes sing out loudly, suddenly, in a beautiful voice, and often she would just make up a song, using a familiar tune and her own words, or just a random tune which didn't really make sense, it was just her joyful song leaping out into the startled air, enchanting me, the listener.  It is genetic, because Matthew does the same thing exactly.

I enjoyed the pencil crayons (they are called colored pencils here, and crayons couleurs in french) that I used for today's self-portrait.  There is a wide range of colours and you can press hard with them and they are lovely and soft and creamy, with overlays and texture.