I have a friend with me this afternoon, here in the dark of a rainy Thursday afternoon, barricaded at the end of the hall in the upstairs window seat, under a quilt my grandmother made long before I was born.
It's a gummy bear.
Blue, so I'm guessing he tastes like blueberry or just gross, as Ruth calls the blue flavor. He's looking out the window as the rain pours down in sheets outside, watching the garden maybe, or maybe he's staring straight ahead, hoping to see through the clouds with his magnificent, miniature x-ray gummyvision™, in order to calculate when the rain will stop and the sun will resume the sad and broken march toward summer.
I watch the rain, too, with my little friend. A break this afternoon enables me to indulge in some of that Bridget-time that is sometimes overwhelmingly plentiful and sometimes completely absent. I've brought my laptop and one cat up here because some comments have been made that I don't use this area for my writing, even though it's as close as I will ever get to the glass turret that once topped this castle. It's okay. I found that curling up in a couch or in the kitchen window seat was just fine, that it wasn't so much the place where I wrote, but the feelings when I wrote, and that as long as I have a little time and a little comfort I can survive quite nicely without an office to call my own.
(Please don't bring up the den right now. I only go in there to clean.)
And besides, if I find any more gummy bears I can stay here even longer since I won't get hungry. And that's always nice.
