an oxymoron

if such a thing is possible, today’s happy is sort of a melancholy* happy. it’s a gray, rainy day (which we’ve had very few of this summer), there’s a hint of fall chill in the air and all i want to do is sit in a dim room, curled up under a blanket in a cozy seat with a reading light above me, a book on my lap and a window in front of me to watch the rain. oh. and maybe a cup of hot chocolate. and maybe later some gentle music. and after a nap, maybe i’ll cook some soup and bread.

but of course, that dream will have to wait until tomorrow and for today, i’ll just comfort myself by sitting in the quiet storage room with large windows, watching the rain while i eat my sack lunch. mmmmm…. pasta salad.

*note of interest: “melancholy” was one of the first words that i read a few times in books before i ever heard it being used in real life and so i had a wrong pronunciation of it. i thought it was pronounced “melahkinee.” when i heard the correct pronunciation, i laughed because the idea of a “melon collie” was funny to me and i thought the person who told me must be joking. other words that i had wrong were, “homogenized” (i thought the g was pronounced like the g in “gun”), “rhododendron” (rahdendrawn), “slough” (a word frequent in the little house on the prairie books….and not really anywhere else that i’ve found–i thought it was pronounced “sluff” like “rough”). i think my dear older cousins were the ones to correct me on the pronunciations of all of these words. helpful, but accompanied, of course by mocking at my original pronunciation. someday, i’ll tell you about my sister and my younger cousin who each had unique interpretations of the name of a small mexican dog.