Ripe Apple by Gary Woodard/Dreamstime.com

A while ago, I bought an apple.  It has been on my counter for a week now, and just now, I caught a whiff of apple flower and summer,the scent that is unmistakable as tomato stem, that alluring, that nostalgic.  These days, I troll the internet, surf, window shop, an activity that brings no lasting pleasure expect a glimpse of possibility, a mulling, a chance to think, can this chair from West Elm fulfill my need for a needing, I mean, reading armchair versus the one from Restoration Hardware, on sale, and with a low shipping rate?  It’s fruitless, my ongoing search for an armchair I may never purchase, an easy way to fritter time that might be spent, oh, I don’t know, writing fiction.  The easy lesson: eat the apple, forgo the furniture, write.

Are things this easy?

Being on the Cape, watching birds scatter among the wintered trees, the pale blue sky, the yellow green turf where the horses glide in an out as if in a TS Eliot poem, there is a heaviness that is really at odds with the light and lightness this area is known for, a heaviness that can translate into ennui which I am trying to break by typing.

It is February, and the pair of ducks–ducks?–aflight now are really pumping their wings furiously to keep afloat, but not merely afloat, but glide.  There it is, the tempo this place creates.  Before, back where I used to live, I’d see runner after runner run by my window, providing extra –no, not oxygen, because that was what they were drawing in, but extra let’s call it oomph.   Here, the landscape is contradiction:  grey, blue, still, with a sudden furiousness that makes me wonder.

A shower, a walk, a cafe, that’s what’s next. The easy lesson.

Net result: ennui broken, friends met, a soft restorative time.  Wandering Note: The Needing Chair vs. The Giving Tree.