Breaking Routine

It comes on so slowly, this change in routine. Yet every season I find myself fighting to hang onto habitual tasks. I need another summer morning to pin clothes to the line while still in my nightgown. I need another autumn afternoon to sit on the porch and listen to dry leaves skitter down the road. I need another winter morning with shoes overturned and toasting on the heat vents.

When it's a couple of weeks into spring before I notice they're gone, I know something has happened to me. On Monday morning I go to the back door to put on my shoes, and they aren't there. One morning, I've forgotten exactly which one, I woke up with the sun warming the bed and a foot hanging out from under the covers to cool, and left it bare.

Spring came while I was sleeping, without a fight, without an upset in routine, without a yearning for twenty more minutes under an old warm quilt. Spring came, and I changed with its first dewy breath.

It's the subtlety, the unobserved abrupt change, that inspires me; always controlled, conforming to nonconformity, and now a foot finding its way out of the bedsheets, willing to step on a piece of glass or a rusty nail if it means freedom from restraint, seems to have changed it all.