When I was a schoolgirl, Sundays didn’t really feel like days off. It wasn’t just that I had to go to church, although that was certainly a factor; it was mostly because there was a school day looming over Sunday afternoon like a beetling cliff above a mountain meadow. Even if I didn’t have homework due, my mother still enforced an early bedtime on school nights, and even after I escaped the house the knowledge that I would not be free to spend the next day as I pleased was enough to cast a pall over Sunday activities. And since none of the jobs I had after 1987 had traditional Saturday-Sunday weekends, that inability to feel free of looming responsibilities eventually seeped into every day off, aggravating my lifelong characteristic inability to relax into a lifelong Sunday-shaped pathology: unless I was actually under the influence of a drug, whatever tasks I might have to accomplish were always lurking behind me, impossible to ignore regardless of my efforts to pretend they weren’t there. But now, five years into my retirement, I’m at last starting to have a little success in convincing myself that there really aren’t any obligations haunting my free time. Sure, I need to go to town once a week for groceries, and several times a year I need to go into Seattle, and occasionally I have some other responsibility to deal with (beside my daily blog work and household chores, which are never completely done). But other than that, it matters very little if I choose to spend a few hours reading for pleasure, or occupy my time in some frivolous but interesting pastime, or finish my next book in September rather than July. And maybe sometime in the next few years, I’ll be able to exorcise that Sunday haunt once and for all.
