Abandoning routine

I’m in Stellenbosch, South Africa, where I’ve come to escape the oppressive wet and grey of Squamish. When the magnolias bloom, I’ll head home, but not a moment before. So for now, I’m working remotely and riding my bike in the sunshine. Winter crushed me in so many ways, so I’m here to heal. Sunshine and warmth are medicine.

I ride or walk most mornings, sometimes even go out for a little shuffle disguised as a run. The heat is the main reason to get out earlier. When I’m heading out at 9 or 10am, most people are done with their rides heading home already.

After my ride, I wash my bike, eat, shower and then do my laundry by hand. As I wash my few things out in the bathroom sink with a bar of Sunlight soap, I question how well the washing machine does this task. The gentle floof-floof of the drum turning back and forth seems so inadequate to me as I vigorously rub the sweat, odor and stains out of my riding kit especially. The laundry goes onto the clothesline to dry in the sunshine. I don’t know why hanging laundry out to dry is so delightful, but it just is and I love it. Is it the warm familiarity from my childhood perhaps?

Then I have the whole afternoon to while away before I need to work at 6pm, when its 8am in Vancouver. Sometimes I walk to the grocery store, or sometimes into town for a meal if I haven’t yet eaten. There’s time to read and write and often have a little snooze. Of course I also have a crochet project on the go. I am learning Tunisian crochet, a style of crochet that’s new to me.

It’s interesting to observe how disorienting it is to lose my routine being in a different place. My entire day is also upside down in that I play in the morning and work in the evening. Without the usual household chores and errands I feel like I have a lot of down time.

Fortunately, I’m very good at doing nothing. I watch the lizards. I think it’s baby lizzy season, there are so many of the little ones. They venture out of the ivy and across a long white wall. This one pauses in the shade, and then continues on, only to turn back a minute later. Did he forget to lock the door perhaps? He scurries back up the wall, little lizard toes stretch out, gripping the wall. Another one makes his way down the hose and across the brick paving.

A butterfly saunters by overhead, large wings flapping once as it glides through the air. There’s a tree in the neighbour’s yard that reaches way up past the wall and I can see the bees flitting from one bloom to the next. The big fat ones are carpenter bees. They’re heavy enough that the little flowers bend beneath their weight and spring back when they fly off.

And then, in the late afternoon, I go to my desk. Full disclosure, it’s hard some days, especially after a big ride, to be focused that late in the day. But it’s a worthwhile trade off for me to be here in the therapeutic warmth and sunshine in February.

Just when I thought I was settling into a new routine, I discovered a coffee cart in the neighbourhood that’s only open until 9am. It’s parked on a side street and serves the best cortado in town. So now there are mornings when instead of plugging in the kettle, I walk 3 big blocks over to get a coffee. But only on the mornings when I’m ready to pull pants on and leave the house before 8 to walk the kilometre to where the coffee cart is.

With no agenda, no routine, you just take each day as it comes. What glorious decadence.