The cool sequester'd vale

The long, hot summer drags on. Yesterday I was so hot! During the night I woke up feeling too warm to sleep, so on my cell phone I looked up Lynden weather. It said that Sunday was predicted to be much cooler than Saturday--yet the Sunday predicted high is over 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Saturday it was over 90! For my international readers who think in Celsius, that means that today it is going to be about 27 degrees and yesterday it was about 32 degrees. High humidity yesterday, too.

No wonder I felt crabby and irritable in the afternoon. Even my dog was getting on my nerves.

Right now on Sunday morning, it feels fairly pleasant indoors with the windows open. I am once again missing church. It's just so tempting to sleep in and have a slow, quiet Sunday morning by myself.

This is how I feel about almost every gathering except family:



I don't mind socializing at work, although even there I talk more to off-the-cuff knots of 3-4 people than at the full staff meeting. At church, I keep moving through the after-church coffee time, but I am happy to get together with my small group. And I like having extended brunch with one close friend, where we talk for hours. But I must say that I do love staying home alone and sometimes wish I could do it far more often, though I suspect it's a wholesome discipline for me to have to go out and interact with others.

My longing both for quiet and solitude and for cooler weather makes me realize why I so like these lines from Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard:

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

I want to keep the noiseless tenor of my way along the cool, sequestered vale of life, far from the madding crowd.