My friend's dog stared me down from about four inches away when I first walked in, like she needed to personally verify who had just been let into the house before deciding whether the rest of the day was going to be a problem. It clearly was not; she settled in beside me within the hour like she had been expecting me for weeks rather than minutes.
Later we walked to a small waterfall in a mossy gorge not far from Solothurn, moss thick enough on the rocks and the fallen branches that the whole scene looked slightly out of season for December, water still finding its way over a low stone shelf regardless of the cold. It was the first day in over two weeks I had not been the one deciding where to go, which turned out to be its own kind of rest.
Someone else decided where to go today, and it turned out to be exactly what I needed.
Nothing about the day needed to be dramatic to be worth remembering. A dog, a walk, a waterfall neither of us had to research or book in advance. After two and a half weeks of trains timed to the minute, a day with absolutely nothing on the schedule felt like its own kind of splurge, the kind that does not show up on a receipt but costs something real anyway, in the form of every itinerary I did not have to think about for a single hour.
