The sun started giving me its wake up call at about 6:30 this morning. It was good of it to let me have a few extra minutes don’t you think? It’s been getting a bit later every day, and as the winter solstice approaches on December 21st, I’m anticipating some darker mornings that equates into me getting some longer sleeps.
Here at the inn we like to call CSI, in the lovely New England town of Enfield, Maine, deep within the inn, Jack and I keep a suite of rooms. To reach us, you ring the bell on the door, and when it opens, you’ll see a long hallway leading down and into a big ‘parlor.’ Off a section of the parlor we have a very large walk in closet that I jokingly tell people is equivalent to my first apartment in Charlestown, Mass. Off the closet is our bathroom, quite big and very private. Back through the parlor you’ll find a doorway leading out towards the front of the house facing the lake. There you find the grandchildren’s nursery. Lilly and Aiden share a long stretch of space with five windows showcasing Cold Stream Pond at one of its widest points. It’s three miles about from our house and shoreline to the other side of the lake, and with binoculars, you can see Sandy Beach and Long Cove and even Hayden Cove further north. Through a set of old French doors, you can enter our bedroom from the nursery. Our bedroom is to me, the most spectacular room in the inn. With three floor to ceiling windows facing the front of the house, and five more of the same off to the side of the house, our bedroom is bathed in light. The ceilings here in CSI, are all white painted tin, original to the home, and in our area they’re low unlike in the downstairs rooms, and as the sun streaks its way into the near naked windows, the brilliance of its light bounces off the water and reflects itself mightily onto the ceilings, resulting in ever moving streams of shimmering light that can make you have to squint on the sunniest of days.
I keep the windows near-naked because it seems to cover up such a view is almost sinful. I have blinds that came with the place, but they’re the white mini-blinds so popular in years gone by and not a favorite of mine. In time I’d like to replace them with the old “venetian blinds” my mother use to have in our various apartments in Charlestown, or even some good old fashioned pull down shades that are dark green and easily block the light. We had these in our bedroom in Haverhill and they could keep you, literally, in the dark.
For now, I’ll keep the mini blinds tightly pulled up to almost invisible, and let the sun have its way with my morning. With so much to do weekly, Sundays seem like the best day for a good extra sleep, even if for just a couple hours. Church doesn’t start until 10:30 so it seems reasonable that to sleep in until about 8:30-9:00 is a wonderful idea. “Not so” says Mr. Sun. “Unless you want to draw down those dreary blinds, and even then, I’ll get in, so you really ought to be up and at ’em there old girl…” I imagine the sun is saying. I roll over and pull the covers up over my head as Jack makes noise about me stealing the covers. I can’t seem to get used to the black-out masks I keep in all the bedrooms for guests to use who do not want to be woken up by ol’ Mr Sunshine, so I lay there, squinting, until it seems fruitless to try to fall back to sleep with the intensity of light bathing every inch of the room.
It’s Sunday, but I give up and go downstairs to find coffee already brewing courtesy of our son Dolan who lives next door and never sleeps past five AM for some unimaginable reason. I pour a steaming cup of the morning nectar and with my little devotional and my falling apart Bible held together by scotch tape and elastics, I make my way out to the sleeping porch that is directly beneath Lilly and Aiden’s nursery. Climbing up on the old iron bed, books in hand, coffee on the side table, I crawl happily under lots of chenille and cotton warmth and succumb to the reality that even if I’m not asleep, there’s still a rest here at CSI that is as easy as Sunday morning.
Cold Stream Inn 