Anti-social? Me? Pish-Posh!

Ah, friday, the end of the week. Oh, wait, that's right, I didn't really have a week. I was home, skipping out on classes and other responsibilities with the flimsy excuse that my car has been in the shop since Tuesday. Okay, the excuse isn't that flimsy when you live 20 miles from any town. I'm as stranded as I would be on an island, except that instead of water surrounding me, it's a lethal combination of marshes, thick woods, and highways where people (who are asked, legally, to go 55) are actually going about 70, passing on the shoulder, and doing all sorts of crazy things. This means: no bike riding or, god forbid, walking, on the shoulders of the roads, even though they are broad and paved, with those scored rubbity-bumpity things along the edges. Still, to be on the roads here without the protection a car is to take your life in your hands. This means: yep, I'm still stranded.

It's been nice. The week has passed in a fog of writing, blogging, studying, walking (with pooch, down my nice long safe gravel road), and a lot of staring out the windows at the leaves changing and rattling down from the trees. I've never been one to mind solitude. In fact, it is a preference for me. I can go days without seeing a soul, without talking to anyone on the phone, and that is just fine.

My record for going without any companionship except that of my dog is 11 days, accomplished two summers ago with J was on a month-long backpacking trip in Montana. I did not go anywhere by car (which means I didn't go anywhere), I did not talk to anyone on the phone, I saw no neighbors, no one stopped by the house, I had no television, no internet. The only person I talked to was my pooch, Zoe, but after a while even that stopped. It was serene. That's the only way I can describe it. I went through the days without saying a word. It made me realize that speech is a sort of burden. Vows of silence must feel like a respite, to permanently relinquish the responsibility of speech.

Eleven days seemed like months. I read for hours, sitting on my back steps, walked down the road and back again, painted old furniture, watched movies, baked, rowed our little boat to the island to go swimming. It was like, for those eleven days, life was enchanted. I was under a spell, a bubble that protected me from the world and put me back to when I was eight and rowing my grandfather's boat into the channel to look at the flourescent molds and algaes, and catch turtles.

This week is a little different. I am still working (studying for GRE, etc.). But I find myself slipping into that bubble of timelessness. When I stand under a birch tree, the trunk glowing white against the crisp blue sky, round yellow leaves like chips of sunlight. The wind runs through them and they rattle like paper, like rustling windchimes. The rusty colors of reeds, lying over in tossed bundles, bumping and rolling across the marsh. Intermittent spikes of an unknown plant, dark red at the bottom, lightening towards the top into pink-orange-yellow, like thin columns of flame shooting up through the reeds, like otherworldly fires spurting up from below .

These are the thoughts that get lost in the everyday.