500 Words A Day - Woman 1

Woman 1 When all was said and done, the very best day of her life fell on a Sunday. This would remain a heavily favored day for her, for as long as she might remember. Sundays would be harder to fall apart then would any given Tuesday or Thursday. Sundays were special, by design and consistently over time. She was cradled in the arms of the last day of the week and would not be dissuaded that it loved any person more than her.  There wasn’t as much natural light because the house faces north. It wasn’t that they missed this observation it was just that, at the time, in the heat of the real estate moment, it had not seemed critical. Now her work was cut out for her.  She would undertake one enormous kitchen and bath renovation to try to ease the housing pains. It did not.   Come rain, come shine and without batting an eye, she pours herself a cocktail at 5pm, no later than 7pm. daily. She would never have described herself as an alcoholic, not in five million years. Not even a little. She did love drinking though. Savoring the thought and then the taste of it the way some of us consume our next meal in our minds many times before actually eating anything. It calms her. It celebrates the end of another day. It sooths the faint but chronic sense she feels, that her life is not what she wanted and the slow but reliable tingling  of distilled spirits, quiets the deeply resentful voices in her severely unchallenged head that have no patience for explanations, rationalizations or romance.  She did not miss the symphony; she did not miss the land. She felt brilliantly lucky and liked her life slow. Her two girls both with bright eyes and low voices filled in the space where her previous life had been. Effortlessly, they exacted the price for their unconditional love. It is not cheap and in a desperate move to forgive and forget, she starts to take piano lessons. Although it will be a spendy proposition, she is immediately taken with a love her teacher; a woman who’d been through some things. A woman who had survived and managed her stress level with a little machine that sat to the right and on top of the piano.  Her speech is involuntarily hurried and, some would say, condescending. At times she seems to be so wrapped around the flashing problems and solutions in her head that she appears unable to comprehend what it is you are telling her about. Teisha worked at writing 500 words a day.   2008