A few days ago we realized that the summer of 2020/21 was the first in a long time, and possibly the first of our four decades of marriage, that we’d spent every night under one roof. We’d normally travel somewhere, or hike with tent, or bunk down in a summer house. Melbourne summers encourage beachside sojourns. Today I counted the days since we returned from our only 2020 hike, one night away, on November 28, and I came up with the number of one hundred.
One hundred nights here, one hundred days at desk … well, that suits and is proper and motivates and sits comfortably … but it smacks of mundanity and fossilization. Or does it? Certainly, life in 2021 is nothing like life in 2016, and not due to the pandemic. I have different priorities. Perhaps those priorities are correctly chosen, perhaps not.