Once a week, I try to go to my favorite coffeeshop in town, The Lively Iris. I pack up my computer, notebook, headphones, a book if I need it, and a bag of my tarot cards in case I need to do a reading.
Having a weekly cafe time gets me out of the house and into a cafe setting where I can guzzle a latte, scarf a pastry and a breakfast panini, listen to the classical/jazz/folk/easy rock mix in the atmosphere and the sounds of local people coming in and chatting with the staff. It’s a reminder of community for me, but also just a little hustle and bustle. In that hustle and bustle I can settle in to work sometimes. Other times, it is me chatting with staff and local people. Recently we have been talking about forming a writing group, and that’s exciting.
It was raining this morning, a lovely rain, as I drove to town. Outside my car windows lay the vast fields of this season’s unharvested giant marshmallow crop.
***
I live out in the forest with my partner about 15 minutes from town in northeast Tennessee. The houses get fewer, further between, and you get more forests and flood plains and the river. Soon, I’ll be approaching our driveway which is about 3/4 of a mile long through the forest. By the time you reach our place, you are deeply sequestered from most traces of city or people. You can see the occasional plane fly overhead. You can lose track of the world.
Which isn’t a bad thing, really, until you lose a Wednesday.
I don’t know if we had two Mondays or two Tuesdays this week, but I expected this to be Wednesday, and I went in to town to find my favorite coffeeshop and it was closed. At first, I thought someone had been sick, and I checked the posted Hours and, yeah, they’re only closed on Thursdays and Sundays, and I assured myself that this wasn’t Thursday.
But it was. I was wrong.
***
When you live in the woods, time can just blur. The cities and the towns keep the rhythm of the days of the week, the heartbeat of community and responsibilities and the flow of cars and people and time. The forest, though, keeps a different time.
But then, so does my partner.
He politely sidesteps (refuses to adapt to) Daylight Savings Time, so for six months out of the year, we are in two different time zones. When I lived in Ohio and he lived here in East Tennessee, he was ahead of me an hour for no explicable reason but his decision to stay on a permanent time zone. Well, that sometimes played into our long distance relationship as 9pm was too late now to start a movie since it was actually 10pm where he was. His nights ended more quickly. We had less time to spend with each other like, you know, lovers in actual different time zones.
But now that I live here with him, none of that changed. LOL. He still has his own time zone. We live in the same house and for 6 months that house will be divided into two roaming time zones… as we walk around. I will be in one and he will be in another, so our suppers will probably start at 4pm and he will go to bed at 9 or 10 pm. I have to think of him as a shift worker and make adjustments accordingly.
Forest Time is probably not unusual. I remember living in the Yukon and there was Yukon Time—and that meant time schedules were fuzzy and blurry for many people–unless you were in the Arts and then you needed people to get there at 7:30pm when the show started. Did they? Most of the time, yes, but if they didn’t, then they were said to be “on Yukon Time.”
But this Forest Time got me today.
And I finally understood how my partner could be in a different time zone.
The days all look similar, and if you don’t go out to visit anyone, you can forget what day of the week it is. We did. We both thought it was Wednesday. Even though we watched “Margot’s Got Money Troubles” yesterday—which is normal for us to watch it the day after it comes out on Tuesday. But I think we both just didn’t register that. We were busy doing some emergency rewiring of the house. He is more of the electrician and I help. But we were doing that and we were mixing up bait traps for the carpenter ants that had invaded my bedroom. And having budget talks. He was programming and I was writing and editing. And we were reading and watching Youtube videos and playing with the cats. And the forest just did its thing.
And somehow removed Wednesday from our minds. Which, if you think about it, is quite an achievement.
I texted my partner from town.
Well, we’ve been off a whole day all week. It’s Thursday. The cafe was closed, I told him.
what
Yep. We both thought it was Wednesday.
Omg. I’ll make coffee.
Lol. Okay, I’m coming back.
***
When I got home, I barreled right across the open air porch into the house, carrying all my stuff.
My partner was in the kitchen. “You walked right past it,” he said.
I turned around. What didn’t I see?
I went back out onto the porch and there was this beautiful little breakfast scene he’d created. A flower in a mason jar on the picnic table with two settings. Paintings were up on the outside walls of the porch.
“There’s a sign too,” he pointed to the steps coming up to the porch.
Written in his handwriting, it read, The Lovely Rain-Porch.
He didn’t want me to miss out on my cafe-time, so he created a cafe on our porch.
He made us coffee, and was about to make omelets, but I surprised him with gas station breakfast sandwiches (which are actually very good). We had paper towels with small spoons set to stir our respective coffees, and art all around us. A little outdoor cafe.
So we had breakfast on the Lovely Rain-Porch, with the rain coming down through the trees and a cool breeze across the porch. To make it feel more familiar, he flipped open a laptop. But only to check the weather map. We ate breakfast, and the cats came up on the table to visit us. And I have been charmed all over again by the man I love.
So, yeah, I might have lost Wednesday somewhere, but in its place, I got repeating days—a few extra Mondays or Tuesdays–and this one.
Yeah, this is a good day to have on repeat.
Bear Witness 