Deep Sleep and Purple Vases

I start awake from a sleep so deep that I am not sure where I am or what day it is. The place where I came from was my childhood home, the living room to be exact and I was looking at my grandmother’s two purple vases on each end of the mantle over the fireplace. Although the glass is thick and translucent they look perfect for ice cream sodas.

My grandmother promised them to me, but on her death my mother took them. Some years later she called me to tell me that she was selling them, but was giving me first chance at $300, then a week’s salary. I was furious. The anger comes back.

As I look around the room, at my orchid with its two flowers and six buds, I think of Colette’s mother, Sido, did not go to visit her daughter because the invitation came for a time when a much loved plant would blossom while she was gone and she did not want to miss it. Although I enjoy my orchid, it would not stop me from a trip. I see the German edition of my book with its changed title Jungen Gemüse . The covers of the Russian and English edition are so different, but I am still too sleepy to wonder about marketing decisions.

I see the stone wall, repointed a few years back by Gérard. Before he did it dust filtered constantly onto my stairs at a rate that as I walked back up the stairs after sweeping the dust away, more fell mocking me. Gérard had cleaned my flat cleaner than it had ever been. As good a worker as he is, I swear he would make a fortune as a cleaning person.

I am back in the correct place and the correct day, knowing that I will meet Rosalie for morning tea, Robbert will pop in later to use my faster ASDL line as he job hunts. No need to foodshop today, there’s enough in the frigo. I will drop off a newspaper to Barbara that might be a good place for her to advertise her shop.

I seldom sleep that deeply, but I was really tired from the night before when worry about my daughter’s cat kept me awake, and I had worked until almost midnight. I am reworking the beginning of my new novel Triple Deckers flushing out the character of the woman who lost her son in Iraq and also sending e-mails to people I want to talk to about the ancient city of Syria for my next book Murder in Damascus. That I don’t have publishers for them yet, does not stop me. I am hoping one of the professors who is translating cuneiform letters from the ancient city of Ebla in Syria will meet me when I am in Rome. It is often the way I work juggling multi projects. Although I wish I could concentrate on one thing, I can’t. Maybe I should self accept.

I throw on jeans and a painter’s blouse, still happy I am not putting on a suit and stockings. My anthropologist friend calls clothing cultural coding, and I prefer this code, the comfortable code. I make my breakfast. For some reason lately I have had a desire for cornflakes, that American of breakfasts in the morning, even though the brand is local.

As I busy myself with morning tasks, making the bed, brewing a cup of tea, sweeping the floor, turning on the computer, I realise that had my mother given me the purple vases, I would have no place for them in my current lifestyle and I let go of the residual anger. In another way, their existence in my memory will last as long as I do and that is enough.