Canter Bridge

Remind me five weeks from now, when the frenzy has engulfed me again and I’m in a hotel room on some two-week business itinerary, waking up and taking five minutes to remember where I am, how good today felt.

It has been so long since a Saturday at home came down like this one. Sleeping ’til a rested body agrees on its own volition to rise, reading in my easy chair with Tucker and Rosie sprawled on the carpet around me. A conversation, a real, genuine conversation with a family member when we looked at each other and recognized something other than a lunatic tempest in lateral motion to somewhere else.

Then a day in the yard.

A man needs a yard, methinks. I sit there now, in my Nicaraguan rocking chair on a concrete slab overlooking the modest domain I call mine. The grass is freshly cut, left long, lush, and slightly edgy as I like it. Here and there Rosie’s attempts to dig a full-scale trench opening in China—as they say—are now filled in with sticks, leaves, those Maple-tree helicopters that descended more suddenly en masse this year than in any previous one, shredded paper, tokens of last year’s compost rich and black.

The Oriole and hummingbird feeders went up late this year—today in fact—and already the first hummer is at it just yards from my chair, asking little but a bit of sugar water in return for his splendid entertainment.

A hundred nails went into a back fence that needed some tightening after four cycles of seasons. While working my way along its well-guarded periphery, I noted four ridiculously welcoming little holes in the dead branches of a tree I’ve learned to leave rather than prune for the sake of the little denizens who make themselves a contented home measured in square centimeters rather than square feet.

The wren house has had or may still have renters. Having cleaned it last Fall, I see it’s now full of twigs and sticks and other bird-ish versions of furniture.

When I scraped a winter’s worth of accumulated leaves—sodden now from Spring’s rains—off the stairway down to the basement, worm after fat earthworm appeared, not welcoming the sunlight. Almost instantly the robins and another black fellow—how do they do that?—had noticed and were upon them.

The chainsaw quit while trying to make pieces of an enormous branch that’s fallen on the front side and has been patiently awaiting its allotted dismemberment for firewood next winter. It’s cooling now as I write, in the vain hope that simple overheating is the problem. I suspect it’s something more costly.

I’ve set the bird-bath upright, recalibrating after a year’s slow-motion slouch in a northernly direction. Fresh water immediately drew a dragonfly and soon, no doubt, the birds who will frolic and bathe in it.

Tucker is now slowing from the cancer that grows on the right side of his face, every day bigger, smellier, droolier, closer to the evil day when we take him for the euthanasia that a kind veterinary assistant explained for me yesterday over the phone while I cried, overcome by the thought of life without our gentle Labby. Yet he’s with me even now, quietly cleaning up after himself when his bloody drool falls to the floor, slightly embarrassed at the trouble he’s causing but oh so happy just to be around. I caught him lying on his back with his feet thrust wildly towards the sun today as I puttered about and he took advantage of the opportunity to be a friend outdoors.

The year’s first hummer—for me at any rate, one supposes they’ve been around all along—now shuttles the three feet back and forth between the oriole feeder and the one intended for him, deciding which one meets his pleasure. Ah, yes, he prefers the one purpose-built for him, a conventional sort of lad.

I answered no email today, solved no problems for other people, refused to fuss about the wider world and its antics. There will be time for that.

Today, at home, in Indianapolis, with family, dogs, birds, and the earth.

One imagines himself for a moment (is this the so-called lucid moment?) as a lunatic when he is not here. Elsewhere has mattered too much.

Remind me in five weeks what today felt like.