It could have been lonely. This morning I awoke for the second day in a row in an empty house. And by empty I mean without Bill. Without children. Without cat…. Just me, and the three fish in their little tank with the noisy filter– the fish with their three-second memory and no attention paid to me At All.
Yes. An empty house.
The plan was to go to church and then hurry home and back to work on the thesis again. That was the purpose of the family going away in the first place: give mom some peace and quiet to get some Real Work done on the thesis.
And so off they went on Friday afternoon, leaving me to my silence, my books, and the yawning blankness of the computer screen.
I decided I would just go to Sunday school this morning and then come home. I had to make good use of the time. I knew it would be lonely to return again to the empty house, but I had to be Good.
Then I entered the Sunday school class, and there was Emily and her gentle lord Byron sitting in the front row. When I went to join them, Byron moved over and made a space for me between him and Emily, and Emily smiled at me in that Most Delighted way she has– the way that makes me think I might be one of her Favorite People Ever.
That wasn’t lonely at all.
After Sunday school I found Rachel, and explained that I wouldn’t sit with her in church after all because I just needed to go home and work on my thesis, and she just looked So Deflated (and who wouldn’t be Walking Deflation when your husband was out of town for most of last week and then had the wretched misfortune of coming down with strep throat this week and it’s all you can do to take care of the boys By Yourself?), and I realized that I really wanted to go to church with Rachel instead of working on the thesis Just Now.
We ended up sitting with Emily and her gentle lord Byron, so that was nice. And we didn’t laugh only one time during the service. No. It was definitely More Than One Time.
That wasn’t lonely, either.
And after church I saw that guy Brent, the guy who is married to my friend Cindy, and he asked whether I wanted to go to lunch with them. And I Most Decidedly Did. So the three of us went to lunch together and missed Bill and caught up on All Kinds of Things.
Not even a little bit lonely.
When I got home, I wrote and wrote and wrote, so that the sum total of my writing efforts for the weekend was eight (8) pages in all. And when you figure that it took me two weeks to produce the first ten pages and only two and half days to produce the next eight, then this definitely feels like a lot.
And it wasn’t as lonely as I thought it would be.
