She gets home from the gym, showers, has breakfast, makes tea.
Remembers, just as the kettle clicks off, that she hasn’t written in her journal for a few days. Three, maybe four? Not that she’s keeping score, but she promised herself that in these early days of retirement she would keep at it – not for productivity, or for output, but for the structure it gives her thoughts. And her days.
So she grabs her iPad, opens the journaling app, and sits at the kitchen table. The tea, hot, not too milky, not at all sweet, sits just to her right.
In the background, breathe. plays – a band she stumbled across a few weeks ago and was instantly addicted to. Two musicians from Sydney, and a variety of vocalists, creators of something described as ‘music for your darkest days’. As ‘late night emotion’. As ‘a mix of soul and electronic’. Whatever the label, it’s perfect for late nights, and, she’s found, for all day.
Their sound spills into the room, occasionally breaking into her awareness. When it does, she catches herself smiling. The music feels like a hug – warm, quiet, exultant.
She writes slowly, not really sure what she wants to say. She starts by recounting her morning: gym was good, though her knees are sore and her shoulders stiff. And then an image from the morning pushes forward. A woman she saw at the gym, older, in an old t-shirt and shorts, stretching by the wall with a kind of quiet grace.
She writes about that.
Then, somehow, she’s writing about the cool laundry under her grandmother’s high-set house up north. The old wringer-washer, enamel chipped, in the corner, edged on two sides by concrete wash tubs. Her grandmother’s hands, with their soft, paper-thin skin, feeding wet clothes through the rollers, careful not to catch a finger.
She writes about the smell of Sunlight soap flakes and wet fabric. About the way her grandmother would tell stories, and the comfort of her silences. Not heavy or cold, but the kind that said, you’re safe here.
She likes the way memory loops like this – from a stranger’s gesture to forgotten wash days in the heat of a northern summer.
Outside, the shadows have shifted across the garden. Inside, her tea has gone cold. Completely untouched.
She notices it only when she lifts the mug and realises it’s room temperature.
The music is warm and deliciously comforting. Unlike her tea.
She sighs and gets up to make a fresh pot.
Musings from the cold 