It's time. Can you hear me?

An Irish Traveller in Dublin watches the neighbor kids play from her trailer window. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's time to take a break. There is a time for everything, you know. Work. Rest. Relax doing something that has no deadline but gives lots of pleasure. 

I cannot explain it, how I love to read good books so much that I do not want to put them down. Sound familiar to you, too?

Is it lazy to read? Are you kidding? 

Is it a waste of time? Well, ditt-o!

Can you hear me? 

I remember a time one summer when one neighbor slyly criticized another in our townhouse community. We were all parents of young children and the neighbor under critique was about eight months pregnant.

And there she sat on the little front porch of her townhouse that had a pretty little traditional doorway with ivy all around the shrubs and even a leafy tree giving lots of shade, all up a little hill from the rest of us. Almost idyllic in our location. 

"Do you see what she is doing?," said the neighbor I met as we were both going and coming that stifling summer afternoon. "She does that every afternoon. Just sits there." That a woman, even one eight months pregnant, would sit and...well, sit. And in the shade of her porch! Maybe she was even daring to make private observations of flowers around her, or listening to bird calls. Maybe she was thinking through another of her problems. Maybe she was even snoozing behind her sunglasses! (All while listening for waking sounds from two very young progeny taking a nap upstairs.) 

Who could know?

That's what can be annoying to some people about other people that take the time...sitting, or thinking, or even reading. There are no clues as to what these quiet, contemplative people have going on in their heads when they are "sitting on the porch."

"Isn't it frustrating when they do that?"

All of that neighborhood stuff was another time and place. Late on this Friday afternoon, I am going to stop work and leap into the time, place, and space of a quiet spot to finish the book I was up into the early morning hours with last night. No apologies. And no explanations about the title of this unusual mystery novel, who wrote it, what style they used, or what bag of tricks and misdirections they contrived until they let the answers come out. It's all between my brain and the book.


Hope your weekend has some spaces. It's time.

Yeah!