Wednesday

 

We left for our first walk with Toby in the dark at 6:00 a.m. Our goal was to beat the heat. Instead of going to the gym, we ran errands getting dog food, gas, and groceries before I leave for Georgia tomorrow to see family (and take our only car). John will still have his bike and the golf cart to pick up things he might need.

I did yoga at home this morning. It's not as much fun, but I think it did the trick.

We stayed inside all day because of the heat index warning. I read Hamnet; I'm about 1/2 way through. One sentence nearly gutted me when I read it. In the fiction as in real life, Shakespeare marries at the age of 18 to a woman who is 26, which is really old in the 16th century. The marriage is rushed because she is pregnant. In the fiction, she's a bit clairvoyant. She can sense the future and the contents of one's soul by feeling their aura and pinching the loose skin between thumb and forefinger. She a mystic and a bit wild. When she is ready to give birth to their first child, she runs away to the woods. When her husband wakes up and finds her missing, the entire village is alarmed and begins searching for her. Shakespeare (unnamed in the book) goes to find his wife's brother hoping he will know where she is. The brother becomes enraged that the husband doesn't know where she is and can't seem to protect her. The brother is a farmer, huge and strong. The writer is rather soft and puny. The brother said he can't understand why his sister chose him to marry. He sees him as pretty useless, even though educated (or perhaps because of it) with few prospects. The brother says if it weren't for what his sister said, he would never have been in favor of the marriage. The husband asked, "What did she say?" The brother replied: "She says that there is more in you than in any person she had ever met, and she is rarely wrong about anything like that."

I finally packed for my trip to Georgia.