“It was like a dream of hell, when a man finds his own name staring at him from the Devil’s ledger; like a dream of death, when he who comes as a mourner finds himself in the coffin, or as witness to a hanging, the condemned upon the scaffold.” – Thomas Wolfe

This is idleness.

It’s another Monday in Boomer, cool and rainy. I have now settled into this unemployed and isolated routine. Today I made few brief human interactions. I went to the farm down the road to purchase apples and sweet potatoes for our upcoming Thanksgiving trip to my parents’ house in Tennessee. The farmers did not have much to say in the drizzle; they pretty much deferred me to the old woman charged with selling their products while they continued their crate stacking duties. Other than that and saying a sleepy, shut-eyed good bye to Loren at 5:45 this morning, I have encountered no one today.
The rest of my day has looked quite similar to the other weekdays I have recently passed. After waking late, I exercised a little, cleaned house a little, read a little, and made lunch. This afternoon I found myself rereading Kay Hagan’s proposals on the middle class tax policy and health care, and I was again filled with pride to have worked so hard to get such a bright and capable woman elected to the US Senate. I hope she is in office long enough to enact all of her proposals.

Tomorrow I will break routine and go into Lenoir to mail out another round of résumés, help Loren’s students with their math lesson, fill the afternoon with reading at the library, then cap the day by having dinner at a graduate school friend’s house. Our friend is from India and, fortunately for us, his mother insisted that he learn to cook traditional food before he came to study in the states. He has cooked for us before and words cannot express the treat bestowed upon our palates. It will be nice to see him again. He will finish the program in December, and I am not sure where he will go next. So I am grateful for this time.

This is life in the country. I am still learning.

It’s morning in Boomer. 6:37 am. This time yesterday it was 18 degrees. It has been 16 days since election night, and exactly two weeks since the morning I returned from Raleigh. It is cold and grey here, and I am bored in this Boomer-town.