Alone

Call me strange. I thrill to find myself alone. I love mornings when I wake and realize the day is mine. Alone. I stretch and wiggle my toes, thinking just fifteen minutes more. And again. My husband has had his orange juice and is on the way to Starbucks. Then he will head to work, to fulfill his final commitment to the corporation that bought the business we worked so hard to build. Nineteen years earlier, I also would have been out the door early, the adrenaline of ambition pulsing and pounding. The fledgling company needed me to survive. I protected and nurtured it, watched it grow. In turn, it was soon able to nurture me and my family. Until it was time to let it go.

Now I linger over coffee and Muesli, browsing through the stack of New Yorker, Harper’s, and National Geographic I ambitiously subscribe to, determined to stay informed, and perhaps wiser. I never seem to get caught up. I wonder if I’m asking too much. The ambitious adrenaline that once gushed through me like a down-hill stream has become a calm pool basking in the sunshine. A few deep eddies swirl here and there: my writing. But no pulse-quickening rapids, no danger, no fear of capsizing. No need to be uber-informed.

My quiet home wraps me in a cozy blanket. I meander through the rooms, breathe in the solitude and remember the craziness of those busy, busy years when every second was planned out, long “to do” lists never quite completed, much like my stack of magazines. I wonder how often my son felt shorted of my attention. I wonder how often my husband thought wistfully of those early years when we always made time for each other. I wonder how often my dogs whined and sniffed the air anticipating my return, a long walk, and a belly rub.

All of that is gone now. My grown son is in a home of his own, my dogs long since buried and mourned. Evenings are happily spent with my husband again, sitting by the fire pit after our evening meal. The ghost of my ambition looks forward to hearing about his day, the push and pull of making vital decisions. My husband looks forward to a time when he too can linger in bed and wiggle his toes. Fifteen minutes more.

So I’ll relish the quiet days, writing and reading and pondering. Perhaps life, and age, knows exactly what we need and adjusts accordingly. Perhaps I’ll let those subscriptions lapse. Sit with my coffee on the porch to watch the squirrels and birds in our backyard, instead.

CANTICLE 6
by May Sarton

Alone one is never lonely: the spirit adventures, waking
In a quiet garden, in a cool house, abiding single there;
The spirit adventures in sleep, the sweet thirst-slaking
When only the moon’s reflection touches the wild hair.
There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone:
It finds a lovely certainty in the evening and the morning…
It is only where two have come together bone against bone
That those alonenesses take place, when, without warning
The sky opens over their heads to an infinite hole in space;
It is only turning at night to a lover that one learns
He is set apart like a star forever and that sleeping face
(For whom the heart has cried, for whom the frail hand burns)
Is swung out in the night alone, so luminous and still,
The waking spirit attends, the loving spirit gazes
Without communion, without touch, and comes to know at last
Out of a silence only and never when the body blazes
That love is present, that always burns alone, however steadfast.