scribbles @ griffonage studios

What Time Is It?
So today is Sunday… legible marks on my portable calendar indicate that we have reached the holiday of Easter in 2008; gateway to the season of springtime/printemps.
Calililies and chocolate cake, that is all that I am visualizing.



My wrist watch tells me the exact hour and minute in Chicago. And simultaneously my Blackberry insists that it is two hours earlier in Arizona.To compound a ludicrously unclear predicament of the present, if I look down toward the lower right hand corner of this laptop of mine I find that it is one hour later than that which is announced on my wristwatch: Eastern Standard Time.



Yes, I had hoped to wear a pale pink something or other, perhaps a skirt and open edged shoes today. Looking down, I find that I am now still bodily entwined in the much more sensible flared leg black slacks and laced up ankle high black boots; an wintry ensemble complete with a knee length black wool coat hailing from so many NYC trips. It’s warm and comfy to be inside of all of this… and rather necessary, although rather odd. In Arizona, none of these clothes would be comfortable at the moment. Not today.



The past week has been a time of endless hours lost in happy, simple conversation and strangely comforting time spent with my Mom who is slowly recovering (or so we truly hope) in a nursing home, from a long list of age related illnesses and physical/mental challenges. A winter storm, one of many unremarkable/unreported nasty ones, characteristic of this neck of the woods, has thwarted my every effort to travel to her side. While the oncoming season generally sings with the usual hope, growth and sunny pleasantness now erupting in the springtime of Arizona, here in the northeastern USA, I listen to the wind howl and thrust dry snow past my window at night. I am sleeping in my Mother’s room, in her big cozy bed. Somehow I am simply glad to be in a place where weather is seemingly at odds with all else, as the warmth of our daily familial interactions supplements the environmental flaws of that which exists outside the window.

Looking ahead, I examine my calendar, contemplate the messages of my various timepieces and try to visualize the various activities which await me next week. My age, my world and the demands of my life still offer a great deal of hope and challenge.



Please, please, I pray to powers which regulate the conditions of the planet/universe, please let the airports be a kinder place through which to pass as I contemplate my storm plagued move to a world of hope and then a return trip to the warmth of the Sonoran desert, in a very short while. Yes, I am feeling disturbingly melancholy as time takes my family on its’ inevitable way toward that which is meant to be… and forces me to follow along an unusual and unpredictable path, in so many different ways.

For the moment, I am happy, sad and homesick.