There’s nothing original about finding Sundays vaguely depressing. Lots of people know what I’m talking about.

There was a time years ago when I loved someone who didn’t love me back. It was awful. His sister thought I was excellent, though. You’re like a Friday morning! she would say, meaning I carried a sense that life was a constant state of happy anticipation. (A completely inaccurate assessment, but not one with which I was likely to quibble.)

I don’t know whether weekends are always better in anticipation; many of them actually have excellent content throughout. But Sunday! Quiet streets, boredom, and the impending prospect of the return to responsibility. It’s like the last day of vacation every single week.

Sunday has a way of making another life, any other life, preferable to the dull, boring, blah, tedious workaday existence that is normal adulthood.

Even when your life is, in reality, perfectly lovely all seven days of the week.

Summer Sunday

1.

Morning rain says Stay in.
Have another cup of coffee.

 2.

Rain on skylights, frantic to come in.

3.

Beside me tall windows take in
a garden view: lavender leaning,
cardinals at the feeder,
tall crape myrtle blooming pink.
The glass a translucent silver smear.

4.

The Muse sits on my sewing table, a din
of ghosts and their half-remembered dances.
I rip a long seam stitch by stitch
thinking to make an old dress fit.

5.

I lean to the work, reining in
what I want of a life
I can’t quite see but must merely
imagine. This must be enough.

6.

The window screens are curtained with rain.
There is no seeing out, nothing beyond
blurred images of here and there.
This will not change.

7.

Rain takes possession of the day:
coming and going, clouds in transition,
a complicated sky. The dog and I
walk between storms, pink flowers
and beads of new water in his black curls.

8.

At last late light comes in
through new leaves, shoots straight across
low hills, curls over rocks where
silty water spills, running fast,
downhill to the creek.

9.

We walk our evening circle, taking in
changes the rain has wrought, the good and ill.
I listen to stories of love and murder,
nod to neighbors I’ve never met,
along familiar sidewalks where now
downed leaves and
drowned earthworms curl, pale strands;
and spiders rush to branches where
they’ll set their webs out for the night.

10.

I walk with my good dog,
leash in hand, thinking nothing
until there is no place else to go
but home.