Lately I have been bored. Today I was tired for no apparent reason and stretched the kids' quiet time out to an hour and a half. After I put E. down I had an hour ( a whole hour!) to myself, but instead of using it productively, I fell asleep on the couch. When I woke up, I spent some more time just lying there, staring out the window at clouds scuttling across the sky again -- big silver-gray clouds, the kind that hang down over you like boulders. The kind of clouds you see a lot of in Oregon, but in Oregon they seem to fit somehow because the whole landscape is so monumental anyway. Even if you can't see the mountains, you have the firs, and they can hold up the sky. Plus, you know that those clouds will bring rain at some point during the day. It's a surety. They're active clouds. Overcast doesn't come without rain -- even if it's only a little drizzle.

Missouri overcast is different. Sometimes it just hangs there, unsupported by the landscaped poplars and ornamental pears -- young trees, thirty feet high at the most. Maybe the old oak the builders left standing on the hill in back props up the sky a little, but it's the only aged tree in sight. The rest are suburban trees, even the ragged row of hackberries along the wire fence that used to mark the line between homes and field and is now the only thing that keeps us separate from our neighbor's too-close backyard. The hackberries are young, too, having grown up as a fencerow in a field no longer mowed, and their tops are mutilated because the utility company cuts them back from the telephone wires that run through their crowns. The suburban landscape is too crowded, too frenetic, too human for these big clouds. The clouds may or may not drop any rain. Everyone is dragging or on edge, waiting for storms or drizzle or for the sun to come out. The kids have been fighting with each other all week, and I can't hold on to anything. Yesterday I spilled two yogurt smoothies in the space of five minutes; today I knocked over a glass of water into the crack between the refrigerator and the cabinets. Either it's the weather or I'm pregnant, or maybe both. Or something.

Anyway, the thing of it is, it is now the time for rest. We humans used to run with the seasons just like every other living being on the face of the planet. But now we have central heat and air and minivans with heated seats, and the seasons don't seem to matter as much anymore. Fall, once the harvest was over, used to be a time to put up your feet, to sew, to read, to enjoy the bounty you'd worked so hard all summer to save. Now it's just more of the same -- rush here, rush there. No time to stop. Instead, we wind ourselves into an even higher gear when October rolls around, beating ourselves into a consumer frenzy that begins with Halloween (which is reminding me more and more of the consumer frenzy surrounding Christmas... I've seen people with Halloween trees in their windows this year) and ends after the first of the New Year.

So I stretched out on the couch today, and I felt guilty about it. Books and toys were strewn all over the floor around me, the kitchen floor needed to be swept, the kids were upstairs pursuing their own educations for longer than they probably wanted to, laundry needed to be done, there was a short story to finish. In the basket beside the big chair where I sit and nurse E. in the afternoons, there was a stack of books I could be reading. Instead I slept for thirty minutes and watched clouds. I still feel guilty about it, and slightly desperate that I need not only that do-nothing time, but also more time to write before I place myself back on an evener keel today, but I suppose that in the grand scheme of things forty-five minutes is not going to matter so much.