Vox Meditantis

Is there an age or year of your life you would re-live?

Saturday, 1st November 2025

The mind makes such tender offers on a damp November evening – little bargains about rewinding a year, returning to a room where the light was kinder and the choices still provisional – but the kettle clicks off, the window fogs, and the present asks to be answered without theatrics or time travel.​

All day the harbour tugged at its ropes like a patient horse, and it seemed to me that if there were a year I’d re‑live, it would only be the one I am inside now, except more awake to it – less rehearsal, more performance, minus the bravura.​

Morning brought the sort of pewter light that makes the river look honest, and the pavements carried the scent of yesterday’s rain and this afternoon’s promises.​

At Marcus’s, the grinder performed its small chorale while he slid my tea to the corner table with the discreet accuracy of someone who knows when quiet is a favour.​

Tom limped past the window at his usual hour – hip ornery, posture proud – and tapped the glass with two fingers, a semaphore of we’re still here that required no reply and offered a steadier one.​

Jenny sent a message from the library – an image of a watercolour handbook with a note about margins being where the real action is – and I considered that true of paper and people both.​

Michael rang between errands, reporting that the pottery studio in Baltimore has a Tuesday slot he’s “cautiously not dreadful” about; we traded familiar banter, and beneath it I heard the mathematics of a man auditing his afternoons for purpose and surprise.​

Between sessions, the rooms held their usual liturgy – chairs angled to invite, tissues unneeded but present, the harbour’s faint percussion through high windows – and I noticed how the ordinary architecture of care feels newly spacious when one stops sprinting through it.​

By late afternoon the sky tried on a lighter grey, and I walked to Moretti’s for lemons and bread, the shop warm with gossip and fennel fronds; Elena tucked a heel of cheese into the bag with the conspiratorial air of a benevolent aunt and told me to eat something that requires a spoon.​

Back home, a small silence gathered before dusk, the kind that registers as invitation rather than absence, and then there was a knock not at the door so much as at the day.​

Maggie stood on the step from the Historical Society, hair damp with honest weather, cheeks bright with intent, holding a thick envelope in the formal cream of decisions.​

“Funding came through,” she said, voice pitched low as if to keep the furniture calm, “on condition we begin this Thursday and that you commit to three hours every week through December – soft benches, sanctuary cards, docents trained to say we’ll wait and mean it; I need your yes by tomorrow evening to lock staffing and signage.”​

There it was – the external world arriving with its neat clock and its useful demands, asking whether I meant any of the things I have been writing in these late‑October hours or whether I preferred them framed safely as literature.​

Inside, I laid the envelope on the hall table where recipe cards and shells keep their quiet counsel, and read the terms with the steady breath I employ for both consent forms and difficult recipes.​

Thursdays, three to six, beginning in five days; design the leave‑and‑return ticket, consult on traffic flow through the harder rooms, train volunteers in the art of pausing without abandoning; this intersects directly with two standing clinic hours and a planned long weekend in Québec that I had booked as a promise to courage rather than an itinerary.​

The letter did not bully – it simply brought the kind of urgency that clarifies values: if presence is not to remain a pretty paragraph, it must take the shape of a calendar.​

I made tea, because ritual lets the heart catch up to the head, and rang Rajesh to ask whether he might exchange Thursday last hour for Friday first for the next eight weeks so a frail gentleman does not lose momentum just because I am attempting a new door in the same house.​

Rajesh – bless him – agreed after a brief silence that sounded like a man checking both conscience and diary, and we arranged to review our shared cases next week so nothing frays from new seams.​

I wrote to the hotel in Québec with the sort of rueful humility that accompanies small postponements of bravery, requesting a shift by one fortnight; their automated courtesy promised a reply by morning, and I felt the minor sting that comes when a bright ribbon is untied and retied to prove it still holds.​

A text from David arrived, unannounced but not unwelcome: an image of the river under a sullen sky and the line, “Looks like the sort of afternoon that needs music or soup – available for either?”​

I answered honestly: soup is in the realm of hope, music in the realm of gratitude, Thursday in the realm of decisions, and could we walk tomorrow after church bells and before the wind asserts itself, so I can speak while moving and listen while still.​

He replied with the grace of someone who understands that intimacy grows better in weather than in weather reports.​

The prompt – though I will not name it – kept nudging: would you re‑live an age if you could, Catherine, or simply repair your attention so that this one stops slipping through your competent fingers.​

I thought of my mother’s audacity – how she would have opened the envelope before the kettle thought to boil – and of my father’s exactness – how he would have mapped the routes and timetables before moving the first chair – and understood that the only way to honour both is to say yes and then show the work.​

Yes means rescheduling two patients with care and explanation rather than apology; yes means training docents to speak like neighbours rather than guards; yes means trusting that the consulting room’s kindness can be decanted into benches and laminated permission without losing potency.​

It also means not hoarding courage for foreign streets when there is a museum three blocks away that needs a gentler corridor by Thursday.​

I penned the acceptance in a hand that did not tremble – practice helps – and added a short paragraph about sanctuary cards using ordinary language and generous fonts, because design is an ethics before it is an art.​

I sent Maggie a brief message to expect the signed letter in the morning and that I would stop by to walk the exhibit route once with her after hours on Monday, so my body knows what my mind intends.​

Then I wrote to two patients whose Thursdays would shift, not with form letters but with the human sentences that dignify disruption: here is what will change, here is what will remain, here is why I believe this small civic work supports the same values that brought us into this room together.​

One replied within minutes with more generosity than I deserved; the other will need reassurance in person, which I can and will provide.​

There was a moment – small but revealing – when I looked at the diary and tried to make the decision elegant rather than real, to colour‑code commitment as if that could substitute for living it; the lamp on the hall table corrected me by simply lighting the paper.​

I rang Father Walsh to leave a message that did not press him about Wilmington but told him plainly that his question about advancement versus hiding is helping me choose how to stay.​

He will hear the between‑the‑lines, which is what friendship listens for when words are working within their limits.​

Before washing up, I opened Dan’s museum pedagogy book to the chapter on rest stops and underlined a sentence about chairs that invite rather than contain; it felt like reading an instruction I have been enacting for years without naming it.​

Night settled without argument, and I resisted the old habit of staging the future in my head, choosing instead three small moves I could accomplish before sleep that would prove today had advanced the plot without melodrama.​

I sealed the envelope for Maggie and placed it beside the bowl of keys, circled the next eight Thursdays in a pencil that can be rubbed back if life insists, and set a reminder to call Rajesh at nine on Monday to confirm our swapped hour.​

On the kitchen counter, the spoon dried with the quiet satisfaction of an object that has done its work; on the sill, the shell held the room’s breath as faithfully as any clock.​

If there is a year to live again, let it be the one in which envelopes arrive and are not treated as weather but as weathervanes – pointing not back toward safety but forward toward the kind of presence that can be found in a consulting room at ten, a museum at four, and a harbour at dusk.​

I have pressed send, and I have left the letter where morning can find it, and I have put the pen down while the ink still shines.​

Catherine

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.