Today was one of those perfectly balanced Saturdays. The kind when it feels like the day just divides itself into little parts that all make sense together. The kind that begins with a special sweet treat like this:
It has all the things that make me most happy at once: fruit, yogurt, bread. I should have included the steaming cup of orange pekoe that rounded it all out. This is the kind of breakfast that I used to eat with a bit too much regularity, the kind that leaves you blissed out on sugar for at least an hour. But Saturdays have more to offer than contraband starches. They offer the promise of my beloved "kiddie bouquet," a $3.70 burst of botanical loveliness that's just a block away at the farmer's market. A pimply teenage Amish boy with braces--no, I'm not kidding, though the braces do seem a bit of a contradiction--hawks them at his family's stand. I buy one each week and it feels like just the right kind of indulgence.
Each week I cut the stems and put them in this little vase my mom gave me during a wedding shower this spring. The bouquet sits on the center of my table and each morning I gaze at it while I gulp down my usual fare: 3 egg whites and a cup of green tea. On Wednesdays, I daydream about the coming Saturday. I imagine a "kiddie" with feverfew and zinnias. I hope that they might be particularly full or tall or a bit different.
But back to the divisions. What makes Saturdays so lovely these days, so perfectly right is that they're the one day each week when J and I seem to share a routine. It's not an exciting routine, but it's something that kinda sorta resembles normalcy. It's a day when we're just really together doing life. Often it looks like this:
I sit and alternate between writing thank you notes, knitting a few rows for a swiftly growing lad, reading about teaching, and writing my job materials. J, as he's wont to do, reads. Occasionally he laughs to himself and sometime I can coax him into sharing the joke with me. We go on this way until one of us needs to squirm (it's usually me) and I lace up my sneakers and head off for a slow Saturday ramble on the shores of the Schuylkill. I ran too many miles in my twenties, hundreds and thousands of miles chasing a yellow hound in the woods. I can't do that anymore, but I still convince my knees that one day a week they can let me go long and steady. I come back from my run wonderfully tired, all the tension and all the panic gone, if only for a moment. 
This Saturday was particularly sweet because we closed the afternoon with a long break in Fitler Square. As J read aloud, I kept knitting, aware that this was the last Saturday of our summer together, the last time, in fact, that we'd spend a lazy day together for a long time. He returns to Kentucky this week and we begin the all the missing, all the longing, all feeling like our lives are just a bit less full, a bit less lovely, a bit more harried and dull for missing one another. But there is, I suppose, the promise of more Saturdays ahead. We might just have to wait awhile.
This Saturday was particularly sweet because we closed the afternoon with a long break in Fitler Square. As J read aloud, I kept knitting, aware that this was the last Saturday of our summer together, the last time, in fact, that we'd spend a lazy day together for a long time. He returns to Kentucky this week and we begin the all the missing, all the longing, all feeling like our lives are just a bit less full, a bit less lovely, a bit more harried and dull for missing one another. But there is, I suppose, the promise of more Saturdays ahead. We might just have to wait awhile. 
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