A Month of Sundays

Definitely, it was a woman of hearth and home who first spoke the phrase, “a month of Sundays” – and I imagine she was toiling at the hearth on that fine day of rest, baking and bubbling the traditional foods for the typical Sunday feast at the end of a week of toil – and this particular Sunday was at the beginning of a holiday season such as this one, in which family would be home, resting and eating and enjoying the fruits of the end of a season of toil and harvest – and this woman, I imagine, would be happy to see her family but yet she would be in quiet contemplation about the work to be done while kneading her batch of bread and keeping an eye on the bubbling pot of stew, looking out the window at untread fields of snow – anticipating not only the forthcoming meal but the nextcoming meal and the one after that and the day after that – 89 to go after this one, she would think in disbelief while putting pans of bread up to rise – and then at some point, though she had been quiet till now, her thoughts would boil over into voice, “And ‘twill be a month of Sundays before me now . . . “

But someone heard her – perhaps a precocious, thoughtful son or grandson heard her from his sleeping loft – and the literary flavor of that phrase struck him for he had noticed her toil on this day of rest for quite some time – and I don’t know how, but at some point, as I imagine, a Shakespeare or a Dickens picked up on the phrase – for they say that you could not pass Dickens on the street but what you, or some part of you, would end up in a book of his; and of course Shakespeare’s best genius was for listening and watching and stealing bits and pieces of all that had gone before him and placing it heroically in the here and now – and so I am going to predict that she, a woman of the hearth, was the first to speak that phrase while kneading bread on a Sunday at the beginning of a long holiday season – and that someone else, with time on their hands, had repeated it or written it down, and somehow it meandered its way to be the catchphrase we say today . . .

Now, I suppose that I could google that phrase right now and find something of its meaning and origins entirely different from my imaginings . . . but that would render unnecessary this short break I take on a Sunday morning to write down this simple contemplation of mine . . . which would make the kneading of my own bread to be no more than toilsome kneading . . . and the spell of she and I together – baking and writing in this kitchen on the first Sunday of a month of them – to be broken.