Day of sun, day of song.

Because exams are coming to an end, the students are starting to warm up for May Week, the series of boat races and all-night parties and general merriment and festivity that make up, well, the middle of June here in Cambridge. Today, Trinity College did its part to send us into the week with a song.

First, at noon, the choir sang from two of the towers in Great Court, and a brass orchestra played from the third tower. The day had dawned cloudily, but by noon everything looked and was perfect--perfect enough for a sleeveless dress and sandals, and perfect enough to leave me actually wanting to do not only the laundry but the dishes as well when I got home.

And so what was meant to be an afternoon of reading became an afternoon of reading and cleaning: washing some dresses in the bathtub (why did I use my sink for handwashing clothes all those years? how did I never think of the bathtub?), eating some French toast, making the bed up again, reading chapters of Hester while waiting for the dryer to finish. When the cleaning was over, I pulled a chair onto the porch and read in the sun until I fell asleep. When my hand fell asleep too, I got up and came back inside.

By this time, though I'd already had a full day, the sun was still high and bright, so I shouldered the camera and went out to explore the field at the end of Rifle Range Road, out beyond the college. For kicks, I went out with my portrait lens on the camera. Soon, I was fretting to myself about how nothing was focused the way I wanted it, how the lens is bad, &c., none of which turned out to be true.



As if that hadn't been enough for the day, Trinity College's choir sang us into the night, as well--this time, perched in a set of punts moored on one side of the river. My Japanese neighbor caught some snapshots of this scene's crazy festivity.



Why on punts? If for no other reason, then certainly to create the right conditions for an excellent departure: singing their way down the river, in the last light of the peak of the year.


And as if that weren't enough for one day, not long after I returned to the flat, my Lexingtonian friends called up, and within half an hour, the littlest one, while snacking on some bread, held a piece out for me--a food offering for the computerized auntie, a fine way to send me off to Monday. I cut myself a slice of bread from my own loaf, and we had our snack together, over our thousands of miles of apartness.