Brey Willows

Card 6, Writing Down the Bones: Tell me about yesterday.

What a straightforward question. I don’t even know how to start with that kind of question that won’t feel boring. I guess we’ll see what comes out…

I slept in till 10. It’s a Sunday, which means no timings. We have timings all week long, Monday to Saturday, from the time we roll out of bed to work out to the time we crawl back into it to read, and Sunday is the only day we don’t schedule anything at all if we can help it.

Nic, of course, was up far earlier and hit the writing studio right away. After I stumbled into and out of the loo, I went and knocked on the glass door to let her know I was up, and she came in for a morning hug. That’s every day–each morning she greets with me a tight morning hug.

Then it was time to make green tea. We drink Tazo Zen, a morning type that settles our stomachs before we add the day’s pile of food. Definitely recommend it, if you have any tummy issues. We drank it in the writing studio, which was warm and cozy since she’d been in there for two hours already, and she caught me up on the tidbits from her morning and the writing she’d been doing. I had nothing to add, since my dreams hadn’t been anything of note and I’d been awake for all of twenty minutes at that point.

Then it was time for scones and tea. That’s our Sunday morning ritual. I make batches of cherry/pecan scones that we freeze, and then thaw out two each week for Sunday morning. No clotted cream yesterday. Just cherry jam and butter. She has tea, I have coffee. I simply can’t get behind tea. Still too American for it, I suppose.

Then it was time for chores. I stripped the bed and threw all that in the wash. (Why are duvets so heavy?) Then I gathered all the other laundry and got it ready before heading downstairs to bake, because we were out of scones, and I make them for Nic’s parents too, and we need to keep them stocked up.

I’m listening to an audiobook right now: NK Jemisin’s The City We Became. It’s a crazy story about monsters in New York (I think?) and I’m not always sure what’s going on, but the narration is truly exceptional. (The one thing I tried not to do was pick up my phone. See, I released Ship of Dreams yesterday and I have that post-release sadness that people aren’t as excited about it as I am, so it was better not to doom scroll. I didn’t look at it until the evening, and that just confirmed things, so I set it aside again.)

The audiobook kept me company while I made four messy batches of scones, then went on to make us a big, American style salad for lunch, complete with grilled chicken and avocado.

After lunch and a Criminal Minds, as well as a deep chat about family health issues and what’s going on with our emotions, it was back to clean up. Laundry, re-making the bed, and then showering to wash my hair.

My hair is naturally curly, though you’ve probably never seen it that way because I straighten it to death all the time. But because it’s curly it soaks up smells like a big hairy sponge, and that means all that baking and cooking I did made me smell like a walking kitchen.

So another hour and a half later, with clean, straight hair, it was time for dinner. We had a simple mix of yogurt and fruit, and cuddled up on the couch to watch an old romantic comedy.

I like Sundays, when it’s just us, doing whatever it is we need or want to do. It’s chore time, but it’s also quiet time, and I know we both need that.

Do you have any weekend rituals?