It’s grocery stores for me, but otherwise I’m there with you on that. I could spend hours.
Maybe it’s because I never got into makeup, but going to the grocery store with my mom (especially as a little kid) is one of my favorite things. What’s that? What’s that? What does it taste like? Is that expensive? That smells good. What’s that? Our Ma is a very patient human.
When you get an unexpected break from work or just your normal routine.
Or home, sick, for several days and you’re not even sure when it is, because your sleep schedule is off, and you have no routine.
Coming home after a trip away, and coming back to work after a trip away.
At some point everything will snap back into being “normal” but not today!
Waking up into a dark room for the week after the DST time change.
Living in a country where good and evil have swapped places.
I think they’re still in the same places they’ve always been; the politicians are just now so secure in their power that they feel they can drop the pretense that they’re on the side of good.
In Boulder I often go on hikes up into the mountains where I don’t get down until dusk. But, even though I make a point to get off the rocks before the sun goes down, there’s still 2-3 miles of hiking back towards my place through woods until I get back into the city and the dark settles in the whole time. This is the Mesa Trail – though sometimes I take branch called “Enchanted Mesa.”
I walk this well-trod trail in the fading dusk, or by moonlight, or by the glow of the clouds; go down over streams and climb back out, consult barely visible signposts to check my direction, take that sharp bend where there’s always a person hooting up above for laughs – or is it really an owl this time? Say “hello” to the occasional eloping teenage couple before they’re spooked to see another person there. Well, they’re always spooked no matter what I do. It’s all at once safe and familiar yet dark and terrifying, lonely – but almost populated.
And then I reach the familiarity of the Chautauqua hill and I greet the woman who’s always walking her dog out there, I go through a couple blocks of houses and now my route home abuts the cemetery. I leave that to the ghosts and to the kids discovering weed and each others’ bodies. My feet ache after a long day of hiking. I’m hungry. It’s still over a mile home – but a more mundane one.
This is off-topic, but that was beautifully-written. Thanks for sharing! 
