Call Me Polly...

...'cause I, too, am all alone.

I'm feeling particularly misabused about it, too, since I have neither a snazzy old phone nor a delicately pink-dyed marabou bed jacket.

Oh, it's nothing to panic about, mind you, and it's strictly temporary.  It's just that I've sent Mr. Muscato off this week for a stretch of Being Nice to His Mother over in Cairo.  Since he'll also be checking in with our various (and, to an extent, distinctly motley) circles of friends, basking in the loveliness of an Egyptian spring (of the actual rather than the political variety - the latter has sadly more or less curdled in past few years), and staying at least some of the time in our comfortable flat, I don't at all feel sorry for him, however much family lunacy assault him on arrival.

By contrast, I'm still here in the only still embryonic warmer weather we've been rather anxiously enjoying this week - it seems so tentative, as if it were still quite capable of changing its mind and bringing us another blast of snow.  And, of course, I'm single-parenting two extremely high-maintenance terriers, both of whom become essentially impossible the moment a suitcase appears and remain so until it is at last stowed away. They're behaving, for the moment, but only just.

As for me, as always every separation reminds me of what a treasurable thing I have in this marriage, and how grumpy and out of sorts I quickly become when our companionable togetherness is interrupted.  Also I spent forty years as a singleton, at least some of them quite contentedly, the last decade has to a point ruined me for my own company.  These little interludes become a time to consider what could have happened had I decided not to go to the Nile Hilton for my usual weekend swim that summer Friday all those years ago.  Given how acidulous and in someways spinsterish I've managed to become even with a happy home, it doesn't really bear thinking...