NaNo Chapter 4

 Chapter four

Cereal Bowls

     Patricia Hollins Kraft woke up before the alarm again. She fluttered her eyes open and took a guess at the time of morning based on the light creeping in through the mini blinds. The guest room was on the street side of the house, which was also east facing and after being here about a week now she knew the schedule of the street lights out front and the time of morning when the sun peered over the neighbor's house. At the moment it was dark enough to guess that it was about 5:30 in the morning, darker than when she went to sleep at midnight with the street lights glaring in through the gaps in the window blinds. A look at her cell phone reaffirmed that her guess was fairly accurate, and she turned down the volume on her phone so that the alarm, set for six thirty a.m. Would not wake anybody else in the house when it went off in about forty minutes.

     Patricia found herself really enjoying this morning time lately. Not to be one who typically turned to meditation or to praying to any god, but she did find this early morning routine that she recently started helped balance her throughout the day. She was still laying on the bed, the quilt bed covering thrown mercilessly onto the floor some time during the evening, and the bed sheets left her half covered, her legs below the knees and her body above the waist exposed to the breeze of the ceiling fan. She was comfortable and she stretched her body in the same manner that she had grown up watching Sophie, her tabby that she had grown up with, do, during those warm afternoons when Patricia returned from school, and Sophie would reluctantly awake to be petted. She rolled over onto her stomach and continued the barrel roll until her feet were on the ground and her body was swung around and sitting up.

     Slightly dizzy from the roll, she sat a moment and slowed down, then got out of bed. She opened her bedroom door, trying to be quiet and wishing yet again that she would remember to oil the hinges in this door, and the bathroom door, because every morning it was the same screeching sound to greet her and it was highly annoying. After her morning pee she went back into her room to put on a pair of sweat pants and went out toward the back of the house. In the living room was her mother's recliner, where she spent most of her time these days, when she got out of bed in the morning, which Patricia gathered took her longer and longer to do as the weeks went by. She looked around the corner and saw no light coming from under her parent's bedroom door and gathered that she probably had a solid hour of alone time. Walking quietly into the still dark kitchen she started the coffee going, wondering why she did not just set up the timer the night before and figured there must be something psychological about that and the door hinges, possibly she wanted to be caught by somebody. In any case she scooped the grounds into the filter and poured the water in and turned the coffee maker on before walking out to the back porch.

     Patricia grew up waking up early, and even started drinking coffee in high school. So this was so far a typical morning ritual for her. In college she learned to finally get going a bit quicker in the morning, heading to class with some foundation on and a small amount of make up, depending on how important the class she was attending was and how much they had to drink the night before. Most of the early morning classes back then were spent arguing the qualifications of Disney princesses and the merits of their clothing. The newest part of her morning routine, the quiet time communing with nature, as it were, was still some what surprising to her though, even though it had been occurring the past two months. Surprising to her was the idea that she did not really know when or why the ritual started. She supposed that it had something to do with her mom's deteriorating health. In any case she found herself already on a sort of auto pilot in the mornings, heading outside to sit on the small block of concrete, cross legged, and was happy like all the past mornings, that even now, creeping quickly toward fifty years of age, she was still reasonably able to sit cross legged on the ground and be comfortable enough as well.

     Patricia cleared her mind now. Again, this was one of the still surprising moments to her, that her mind would clear so easily considering this was something she did not grow up doing. Of course, she also realized that sitting here, on the cool concrete patio, thinking about how your mind was clear was not exactly clearing your mind, but even at that her breathing became automatically more regulated, more peaceful. Years ago of course she would have come out here to smoke a cigarette and this type of regulated breathing was much more peaceful. She did seriously clear her mind now, letting the thoughts flow out while she concentrated on the feel of her breath, the actual in and the out of each breath, the weight of it against her lips, the coolness of it inside of her nose. This was a process that brought her directly into the here and the now, completely in the moment, and from there she stopped concentrating on anything and let any remaining thoughts she had to come in and out of her mind as they wished.

     Patricia prayed. And again, she did not understand why this was a part of her process, and whether or not it actually worked. But it was still something she did every day, for the past few months anyway, and she supposed, later in the day as she thought about it, she did it to find a center, or to find a sense of peace, and in that sense it worked exactly as it was supposed to. She did not pray to receive things. And she did not think that she prayed in order to satisfy some need in herself, some reaching for a god. It was just something she did. If she imagined the words that went with her feelings, Patricia Hollins Kraft imagined it was along the lines of becoming whoever it was she was supposed to become. If she attached words at all to what she was breathing it was only a sense of being, not only in the moment, not just zen, as the new age spiritualists in Hollywood were fond of saying, but in the past and the future as well, that from here she would approach the world more in tune with the world around her.

     In any case, Patricia found a sense of belonging during this quiet reflection. It was not an indication of a belief in a god, or non belief, for that matter. She sat quietly and she emptied her head and she opened her soul and she did this every morning because it brought everything out into the open and onto the surface; her life and decisions, her mom's illness, her family dynamics. It was all brought up not with bitterness nor joy, and not attached to any resentment or atonement. It just was and Patricia Hollins Kraft found herself at one with the universe.