An afternoon in my mind

I long for the perfect afternoon. why it has to be the afternoon and not the morning or evening or night even, I don't know. perhaps because in my mind afternoons stretch longer. for some reason the clock grows slow. The lethargy having caught up with it as well, perhaps? Not all afternoons are the same though. Maybe they will be if they were as perfect as a quiet Saturday arvo. Saturday afternoons seem the perfect time. Is it because they have ahead of them another whole day of resting?

The afternoons I hope for are similar.. maybe they belong to slightly warm Saturdays or days when you don't have to be somewhere else with a few things to be done. These afternoons will bring with them intermittent cool breezes that one waits for. The breeze that will feel like the cool side of the pillow on a warm night. Lying down or sitting in an easy chair having put my legs up I will have a book or a magazine to take me to another world. A world in which the my imagination is let loose to show me the most amazing sights than those shown in a movie should the book be made into one. This idyllic arvo will see me day dream, watching the trees sway lazily.

I have a images of this perfect afternoon in my mind. From whence they came I don't know. There's this one, in which I am in a hammock or a cloth backed easy chair or the brown sofa we have now. If it is either of the first two then I am in the shade of a tree planted in white-grey sandy ground. Like the one on which most of Batticaloa stands. Otherwise I am on the brown sofa and not very aware of the surroundings. (I should pay more attention next time this image is conjured up in my mind.) In this image I usually am reading.

Then there's this other image, where I see in a house with a high roof an old fashioned divan which sometimes changes into a flat wooden swing - the sort that is common in India. I can see myself lying down on the said furniture and I can vividly see one end of Amma's soft cotton saree, for some reason is sometimes blue in my images when the very saree I am thinking of is tangerine/golden yellow - which I have taken to cover myself with instead of a sheet - lifting in the breeze. I am asleep. As if I have not slept in years. Out the back door through which the breeze makes its way into the house I can see a a neem tree and a coral jasmine tree. The ground keeps switching back and forth between being red and white-grey.

What obsession is this that I have with quiet afternoons?