Mellow

I am enjoying the quiet of my life this week.

Last week I whirled through the unusual. Teaching, writing for a deadline, interviewing and being interviewed for a class, going away without the kids for a food/shopping weekend with my mom and sister: four things that are not regular parts of my schedule, piled onto the usual. Something had to give.

My priorities shook out as follows:
1) My husband wanted to stay home Saturday. This meant grocery shopping for husband-friendly food.
2) A deadline must be honored, class due dates must be met, but cleaning never ends. I decided cleaning could wait. This might sound like a rationalization, and maybe it was, but understand that I hate going away and coming back to a dirty house.
3) Certainly I rationalized this: If you are going shopping for clothes, then you don't really have to do laundry or pack. You just have to shop. I submitted my deadlined story at the wire on Friday night, with children pounding at the door. I posted my class assignment Saturday morning, threw a pittance of attire into a garment bag and ran out the door.

I came home Sunday night to a flipped script. I found my house in better shape than I left it, my family in a good mood, my pick to win the Super Bowl victorious. I breathed.

This week rings strange, but it's a welcome sort of strange. Mellowness. Getting things done, but without having to run or push or scale back. It's traveling by inner tube rather than speedboat, and it's a welcome pace.