Season of Malaise

"And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!"
—excerpt from "Work Without Hope" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Those lines of poetry floated through my brain as I assembled a ham sandwich in my kitchen. I had been online, studying Spanish with my tutor, and I needed to take a break for midday nourishment. After lunch I returned to my computer and resumed the lesson until 5pm. At that point I quit the lesson in order to eat a small supper. Tonight, supper was two bowls of Brunswick stew.

It's gloomy outside, as it has been all day. The sun is setting and darkness will be here soon. I will take more Spanish lessons before I quit for the day. I'd like to go to bed early tonight. When I stay up late I want to sleep late, and that is not something I want to make a habit of doing. I manage to squeeze in an hour of TV entertainment each week. I watch NCIS (the original, not the spinoffs) when I remember it's coming on TV. But I'll watch no TV entertainment tonight.

I call this time the season of malaise. Not only is it often cloudy, cold, and raining, but there's a pandemic out there. If only Coleridge were alive today, he would be writing a poem about this pandemia, in which emotions often mirror the weather.

Yet, I know that Spring will come. Winter will go back into hiding, the birds and bees will return and the amaranth will bloom again. We can pretend, for a while, that we are in a normal world, even if we are not. Especially if we are not.