L has a great new friend at a neighbor’s house. Occasionally, she brings the little fellow over for a visit.
Day: June 26, 2013
Rainy Afternoon
Between the recurring rain — eternal, daily, multiple-times-during-some-days-all-day-other-days rain — we tried to make the most of those periods without rain. Three mini-adventures:
1) The dog needs a walk, so I took him for a walk in the fields, and discovered once again why the fields sometimes emit such a strong odor of manure despite the relatively few cows grazing there.
2) Days like this in Polish are called “bar days.” Hardly an appropriate option for a six-year-old; hardly desirable when alone. So we found the obvious compromise: a “restaurant day.”
3) One former teacher/colleague is now the mayor of Lipnica; another is the director of the new Orawian cultural center in Jablonka. I set out to chat with him a few minutes and get a look at the center itself.
Not an ideal day, but what can one do on the sixth consecutive day of rain…
The Smell of Autumn
Walking the Girl to preschool today, I caught a faint whiff of coal smoke. Immediately thoughts of late autumn, of settling down for a long winter and the developing school year, of boots and jackets and layering all returned. For a brief second, it was as if I had returned to 1998.
Polish Weather
My general color association with the sky in this region is gray — a mix of dark gray and light gray, a whole palette of grays. Some days, the sky was a solid, single gray. Other days, there were lower gray clouds with higher clouds of a lighter gray. But no matter what shade of gray, there was one thing in common: the sun was invisible. Hidden. Nonexistent.
For the first few days here, the sky was blue, the sun was out, and I actually found myself thinking from time to time, “Wow, it’s actually almost hot.”
But of course it wasn’t to last. For the last week or so, the gray has returned (with the exception of a couple of hours yesterday morning), the temperatures have dropped: the Polish weather I loathed has finally arrived.