Here Comes the Sun

I'm torn between this daily writing exercise w/coffee ritual and an amazing sunrise which is streaming gold through my window. Nature wins!
Back with frozen toes. Amazing. It's the end of October and I can stroll around the backyard in thongs and a housecoat for 20 minutes. Something my cherished former landlady taught me. She used to stroll around in her housecoat in sub-zero February. And she was in her 80's. I really loved Colette. She had so much character and although she would come into my appartment and bawl me out for letting my wok rust, in the end she was like a grandmother to me and my 5yr old daughter. In fact, she was the first person to treat me with any compassion at all in Luxembourg. Despite the fact that her original intent had been to have an additional servant living in the cottage and paying rent... (Lot's of work on a property like hers) She tried for months to get me to open her shutters in the morning and close them at night...which I did as a favor sometimes. (She had a maid) I remember once, I was hanging the laundry in a rather mishappen manner whilst being observed from Colette's parlour window. Over she comes to comment on my lack of style. WHAT!? Will these people not relent?! I am a single mother, in a foreign country, with a 12 hr/day 6 day work week (when work was available) I'm doing my best! Give me a BREAK! So I asked her, in light of all this, to explain why I should bother to hang the socks with the socks, the undies with the undies etc., and she told me "Pour l'amour des choses bienfaits". Which means, "For the the pleasure of doing things well." And she explained the feeling it gives to look out the window and see neat rows of laundry all carefully laid out and drying on the line. Zen of laundry.
Luxembourg has some old fashioned ideas about things and I had already been chewed out for laundry drying on a Sunday, by a different landlord, but this time I keyed into something: the quality of living that requires a little more effort but allows you to slow the pace and take pleasure in life's unavoidable repetitive tasks. So many ways this cantakerous old lady will never be forgotten. I wish I could talk to her again. Colette passed away this time last year. She said she would fly out the window like a bird...I totally believe she did.
PS. Colette, Carine is still not closing the shutters...