Day 34

I "ran" two miles on the elliptical machine today, at the gym.  It is always so hard to get up early in the morning to go there, it is not where I belong.

There is a man and an old lady whom I see every single time I am at the gym, and I go at different times, so why are they always there?  The old lady is always walking very slowly on a treadmill and the man is always standing talking to some poor person who is trying to exercise.  And no, he is not the trainer or the person on duty.  All those people wear special t-shirts so you know who they are in case you need to ask questions or be rescued from weights or something.  It is a mystery. 

We live close to the Essex River, a serpentine tidal river stretching sinuously from our town to its mouth into the great Atlantic, from which our town gets it name.  Recently it has been covered in ice. 

The meandering Essex River. Panoramas taken a week apart, from the same vantage point.

There are many words in the English language.  It has the most words of any language because of its origins, as it subsumed foreign words as it grew like a large organic creature swallowing everything in its path.  The Oxford English Dictionary describes it in a more polite, mathematical way: "The Vocabulary of a widely diffused and highly cultivated living language is not a fixed quantity circumscribed by definite limits... there is absolutely no defining line in any direction: the circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference."  A beautiful concept, exquisitely explained.

I love my language and studied it formally for years. Even grammar fascinates me, syntax, structure, the theory of it all.  I can be reduced to tears by a line of a poem, or touched by words uttered by my husband or children. I can sink into a book until I am in that world of words, so far removed from the ordinary present world.  But there are many experiences for which there is no language, or there are only limited words.  Perhaps we don't know enough words, our vocabularies are too small.  Out of the 1,022.000 English words, estimated by the people of Google, we only maintain a small percentage in our brains.  And although as human beings we use language to express ourselves and communicate with one another, although we use the same word, for example, the word "love", we probably all mean very different things when we say it.  We can't even be sure that when we say "That is a yellow wall", we are seeing the exact same colour.

Matthew and Nick were my last children to leave home, almost three years ago now.  Nick lives in the city, about 50 minutes' drive away.  Matt lives a bit further, just over 2 hours' drive from our home.  They are both away from home.  Each day I think of them, knowing that they are away, absent from my daily life.  I picture them in their rooms, walking, biking, taking classes, because I have visited them both and have these experiences to inform the pictures in my head.  But now Matthew is in Senegal, the "away" takes on a different meaning.  On the one hand he is still away from home, as he would be at university, but he is somehow more "away" because he is so far afield.  He is more "away" because I can't see where he is, I can only imagine the streets of Dakar, his room, his host family, his new friends, the classrooms. 

My daughters and granddaughters are away in a different, faraway sense too.  It is the nature of our "Global Village", some say, and yes, people move around so much these days, all over the earth, but I would prefer them in my real village, where I don't have to wait for my vacation days, buy an expensive ticket and get on a plane to go and see them.

And now I will go up to bed, so tired from shovelling snow, and more to come on Wednesday and Sunday!  And I will fade "away" into delicious sleep, perchance to dream.