The Amber-Colored Lightness of Unstructured Time

You’ll be pleased to hear that I have taken the advice of a large number of folks' initial reactions to learning that I had this week off.

They suggested that I “relax”.

And so I have.

It may be the first recorded instance of it.

And I have entered an interesting frame of mind.

I am on vacation. See me? Over here? Yoo hoo!

And on this vacation?

As in all vacations, I’ve decided that the numbers on the clock are powerless to affect me.

And I’ve rediscovered, if that can be said, what I’ve known the whole time: I like to stay up.

As a younger woman, this propensity lent itself to some pretty pathetic mornings, the kind of mornings where you find yourself digging through your hamper for the most acceptable pair of pants and applying make-up in the parking lot at work.

Who wants to be anywhere at 8:00 when you didn’t go to sleep until 3:00?

As an older woman, however, a woman with over a week off, this proclivity, coupled with a laptop and cable TV access? My mascara remains perfect but my posture is slowly going to hell.

In a collection of public holidays and a company’s week-long shutdown, this is the fifth day in a row that I have not had to work.

This makes it practically a sabbatical in U.S. terms.

When was the last time, my fellow Americans – and I am not speaking to the retired folk! You people are always taking off, enjoying yourselves! – when was the last time you took time off of work longer than two weeks?

Honestly, with the slow collection of vacation time that most companies offer, I have to admit that I had been working more than a dozen years before I took two weeks off.

And here I am, sitting on FIVE WHOLE DAYS, and I’m crazy with the light.

The light! Daylight, people! Precious, precious daylight in the winter!

My people in Sweden, Norway, Denmark! You understand, don’t you, about the light? Think of the weeks, the months. The days where the land and the sky are white-white-white – and better yet the days where the land is white and the sky is a vivid blue, a blue that always impresses itself upon one, the feeling that that blue must, somehow, be fake.

The weak, precious winter light is normally available to me only on weekends. Minnesota winter: I go to the bus stop in the dark; I come home in the dark.

To be out, in the light, has been eye-opening and pupil-dilating.

Beautiful, beautiful winter.

Beautiful, beautiful relaxation.