An extract from my thinking

The following was written during the lunch hour while I was at a time-management course at Fanshawe College. I know there is much I should be writing about, but I just don't seem to have the energy any more. Anyway, read on:

I found myself sitting at my desk in my one-day time-management class, enjoying my lunch and playing Spider solitaire on my computer with, as usual (perhaps the reason I'm in the class?), a wandering mind. Suddenly, I found myself thinking about a Christmas long ago, in my childhood in the house I grew up in on Avenue Road. In this recollection, I am sitting at the dining room table, feet curled from the inside out around the front legs of the dining room chair that marked -my- place at the table. I am colouring. It is the afternoon, probably around lunch time and it is either a weekend or a holiday, because I'm not at school, but I'm not sick. It's quiet in the house. We were the first house on the block to install sliding doors out into the back and ours were the kind that have panes, so they looked like French doors, rather than a standard plate glass patio door. I used to like how the light came in and used to try to take artful photographs of the outside through the panes, maybe with a plant in front, but it never really worked. There were light, filmy transluscent drapes that hung on either side of the doors, in front of the pair of covered radiators on which the cats used to sleep. It was a really beautiful room and I spent a lot of time at the table, not just eating - we used to try to have most of our meals at the table back then - but doing homework, doing art, working on projects, practicing the various instruments I was learning to play. There was a certain way that the chairs scuffed the hardwood floors, snagging in the cracks and making the chairs creak dangerously. The chairs had a habit of collapsing for no apparent reason and you never knew when it would happen. Sometimes only the slats would fall out like a folding fan opening, the way they did that time when Tracy was over, on rare occasions the wrong twist on a chair leg could cause the whole thing to hit the ground, legs akimbo, but chair back still rigidly upright. The table creaked, too; it still does, as do the chairs for that matter, but they don't collapse any more. The table would click and creak with a staccato rhythm when I coloured, my hand working back and forth over the sheet, marker or crayon leaving behind streaks and stripes of colour. The marker, in this case, made soft shushing sounds as I worked. I am, in this recollection, colouring transluscent paper Christmas ornaments of the sort meant to look like stained glass. It's a lovely colouring book sent to me, I think, by my Tantes - my Dutch great-aunts.