Shadows & sunbeams

Mask. No glasses. No headphones. No gloves. No socks (monster!)

I really didn’t feel like going for a walk this morning, dammit. But go for a walk I did, because I know it’s the easiest and nicest way to optimise my mental health for the day.

 It took until the halfway mark for the hoped-for meditative hum to emerge. Before that it was all swirling hard things, dodging dog poo and fighting against the blurry no-glasses vision.

But then it all changed. It switched out to noticing the mist peeling off the bushes, spotting sunbeams triangulating from sky to frosty grass, spying  thousands of blades of grass all equally dewy and leaning in the same direction. Eyes landing upon a pair of glasses sitting on someone’s front fence, lenses beading with last night’s raindrops.

You know, so many houses in this area have flat roofs, the very same kind that my childhood shack sported. They’re not small and squareish with peeling blue paint like our shack was, though. They’re vast, whopping, even. Usually brown and sometimes multi-storied. 

Often they have a balcony of curled metal prongs, facing into the sun. Large windows edged with stripey blinds. Aging gardens filled with low maintenance red hot pokers and monstera and agapanthus. LOVELY.

Five lorikeets flew overhead as I walked, squawking rainbows in a perfect blue sky.

My shadow trotted quietly along beside me. Taller, thinner, exaggerated mum bun like a Tove Jansson character.

At the corner I encountered a maskless man walking his dog. He turned away and began fumbling in his pockets. I kept walking.

When I got to the between-houses parkland, I spotted a pink lady in the distance. As she and her pink shirt drew closer I saw she was wearing a mask … but when she walked closer still I realised she had a very white face.  As she approached me, she began running very quickly and disappeared around the corner.

As I got closer to home, I realised I was holding a sort of grimace under my mask. So I tried to loosen things up, wriggling my mouth about and chattering my teeth in an effort to vamoose the weird sideways mouth I had going on.

It worked. Who knew that there was such a thing as mask-face? I suppose it’s kind of like the face you might pull when trying to apply a nice winged eyeliner … only longer-lasting?