Perspective

On a recent weekend, I was returning from an errand, in a blue funk. 

It had been cloudy for most of the day, so I had left my sunhat and sunglasses at home. Tired and footsore, I reached a busy intersection, and the sky cleared quite suddenly, and an overly warm sun, made muggy by the recent cloud-cover, hit me smack in the eyes. 

But that wasn't the reason for my misery. 

I was feeling closed in, burdened and crushed by things I needed to do, or thought I needed to do.  

As I made my miserable way down the hill, aiming for the leafy, shade-giving boulevard, I thought about the very latest I stayed in Victoria, out of the seventeen summers of respite during my exile in Hades -- September 4th.  Once.  We were usually hauled back to Hades by mid-August.

And it hit me.  It's September.  It's late September.  I'm not back in Hades, because I live here.  I have a bus pass, because I live here.

And I moved down the hill into our neighbourhood, near the old house where my daughters were little girls.  Children were playing, and a small knot of adults chatted on our old street. And I heard something I haven't heard in over two years:  music wafting on the breeze from a concert at the Cameron Bandshell in Beacon Hill Park, about a kilometre away.

And I was smiling.