My grandmother once told me she hated Sundays. “No one ever visits,” she told me, the lonliness in her voice becoming a third participant in our conversation. “They’re all home with their own families.” At the time, I was only eighteen or twenty, and had no idea how to answer that, so I changed the subject to something lighter. But her comment has stayed with me, all this time.

I was thinking about this as I was puttering around in my kitchen earlier tonight, cleaning up, making meatloaf in celebration of Fuzzy’s early return from DC (he was supposed to be there through this afternoon, but they apparently completed their agenda early, so he got a standby flight back from Dulles to Dallas at eight this morning), and later baking chocolate chip cookies (using spelt flour left over from my mother’s visit, and Deb’s trick for keeping the nuts from burning), and chattering, sequentially, with my mother and aunt on the phone.

I like Sunday evening to be at-home time, us-time. A time when we might watch television together, each of us cuddling a dog, but when there’s an equal possibility that we might NOT. I think it’s important to spend the evening doing restful tasks, winding down from any weekend excitement, and making the mental shift toward the beginning of the work-week.

This evening, we listened to Survival Kit on NPR – it’s a show where literati and other public figures are asked to create a list of essential items to bring to a remote area (mountain cabin, deserted island), and then are interviewed about their selections. On tonight’s show, the choices ranged from spectrometers to foofy fountain pens, manual typewriters to jazz compilations. It was just interesting enough that as we ate, and later as we cleaned the kitchen, we could listen and make comments, but not have to stretch our tired brains to make real conversation.

Later this evening, as Fuzzy was curled on the couch watching tivo’d episodes of Andromeda and Battlestar Galactica, I watched the light playing on his face, and the dog stretched down the length of his leg, and smiled. “I love this,” I told him, feeling disgustingly sappy. “I love Sunday evenings, when we’re home, and everything’s cozy, and we’re together even if we’re not talking much. I love my house, and I love my dogs, and I love you.”

He was watching me, smiling at me in that quasi-flirtatious way he does when he’s affectionately amused by my behavious, and I told him to stop laughing at me.

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m smiling at you cuz I love you. Can’t I smile at you?”

I grinned at that, blew him a kiss, and went to take the first batch of cookies out of the oven. As I stood there, the heat from the oven making my face feel rosey and warm, I thought that if my grandmother was alive, and was somehow able to peek into this moment of my life, she might not hate Sundays, after all.