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Category: time

In the Can

In the Can

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Not to get too meta here, but writing this blog is largely a seat-of-the-pants enterprise. Most of my life has been tightly scripted until recently, so I’ve wanted to keep this writing loose and open. 

I’ve also resisted the temptation to draft a bunch of posts on the weekend to carry me through the first few busy days of the week. The details of the day are my inspiration, and they usually (kinda sorta) pull me through.

But recently, I’ve found myself writing several posts a day. This may be, probably is, a momentary thing. Inspiration tends to go in cycles, I’ve noticed. And it is undoubtedly made possible by the gift of time. 

Whatever the reason, though, it’s meant that, for the first time in forever, I have a few posts “in the can,” as we liked to call them back in my magazine editor days. 

They will come in handy on the days when the muse of daily inspiration is otherwise occupied. 

Raindrops on Roses

Raindrops on Roses

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Not on roses, actually, but raindrops on the leaves of the elephant ear plant. Raindrops I first spotted a few weeks ago when I was out walking Copper on a moist morning. 

I marveled at the way the liquid pooled on the surface of the giant leaves, thought to myself, you must snap a photo of this.

But I came inside and immediately forgot the impulse. By the time I remembered, it was too late. The sun had warmed the leaves and the moisture had evaporated. 

The artistic imperative strikes when it strikes. It does not linger. Luckily, it rained again.

Up Early

Up Early

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I’m up early enough today that the morning is still getting to know itself. Crickets have yet to turn in; their chirps form the rhythm section for which bird song supplies the melody. 

Copper has not only gone outside but has scampered down the deck stairs, an accomplishment no longer guaranteed and thus appreciated more. And in other pet news, when I uncovered the birds, Toby, the newbie, had found the highest perch and looked quite pleased with himself.

I hear bluejays and crows calling as I rise from the couch to make my tea. The back door is open. The back yard is mowed. Reading and weeding await me.

The details of a day I’m privileged to watch unfold. 

(A photo I took Saturday, a few miles from home.)

Harvest Time

Harvest Time

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A day’s drive out, a day’s drive back and three days in my hometown leave me in a state of addled contentment now that I’m back home. Throw in some nostalgia and amazement — from visiting with folks I haven’t seen in 10 or 20 years (numbers we toss around as we used to the single digits) — and you have a lovely way to end the summer.

Or is it ending? It will be 90 again today,  the cicadas are crescendoing and the humidity is creeping up as I write this post on the deck. 

Given the opportunity, I’d probably keep traveling and keep sweltering another month or two, but September is almost here — September with its call to purpose and purchase. It’s time to harvest what I’ve sown. 

(Joe Pye weed in a Jessamine County, Kentucky, field)

Tuesday Already?

Tuesday Already?

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I’m only two months into this new phase of life, taking a measure of its contours, trying to figure out if time will pass more quickly now that I have a slightly less crammed-full schedule or if it will slow down instead. 

I’m hoping for the latter. Which is a good sign, I guess. One wouldn’t want to slow time down if time were hanging too heavily on one’s hands.

But what if the opposite is true? What if the days and weeks are still winging by? What if the chunks of free time are still not roomy enough? Am I being greedy? Am I asking for the impossible? After all, I’m not 11 years old and on summer vacation. 

Patience, I tell myself. The long afternoons are on their way. Just not yet. 

ISO Open Days

ISO Open Days

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For someone recently retired I haven’t exactly been twiddling my thumbs. I didn’t intend to be idle but I did expect to experience brief periods of thumb-twiddling, cloud-gazing or even some good old-fashioned afternoon ennui.

Nothing of the sort has happened. 

In part, this is because — in what seemed smart planning at the start but I now realize was the exact opposite — I spread out long-overdue appointments and errands so that no day was too full. As a result, there have been almost no days that are open enough for cloud-gazing or thumb-twiddling.

Even a planned business phone call can bisect a day, can puncture its purposelessness. This from a person who used to pride herself on how many to-dos she could pack into 24 hours. 

Lo, how the mighty have fallen.

(I borrowed this meme from a Jeff Speck newsletter.)

 

Outside-After-Dinner

Outside-After-Dinner

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The sound of children laughing two doors down, birds rustling and roosting in the azaleas, the clatter of plates being cleared. It’s 7:30 p.m. and as bright as day. It’s outside-after-dinner. 

To a child, this is a place of its own, magical and wild, long shadows looming where there were none at noon. It’s a place where rules are bent, bedtimes extended. 

When I was a kid I’d be excused early with cookies to go, then run to meet playmates from next door and across the street. We played SPUD and Red Rover till the streetlights came on.

For my own kids, there were long evenings catching fireflies or climbing hay bales to ride the zip line from the big oak on the Riley’s side of the yard (which is still standing) to the big oak on the Voegler’s side (which is not).

Now we sit on the deck slapping at mosquitoes, putting off going inside. There are grownup tasks awaiting us — bills to pay, emails to send.  But it’s hard to abandon the soft light and the feeling we’re getting away with something. It’s hard to leave outside-after-dinner. 

A Whirl

A Whirl

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The last few days of paid employment are flying away like paper pages from a calendar in an old movie, the gimmick directors used to show time passing. Which is to say quickly.

But that’s now. A few months ago time was hanging around my ankles. I kept paging forward in my desk diary, looking at the day I had appointed for notifying management of my decision — it seemed as if it would never arrive. 

So in a way, my experience of time recently has mirrored its journey through our lives: the languid days of childhood, the accelerando of adulthood, the spin-crazy way the pace picks up as we age.

By that reckoning, next week will be quite a whirl. 

Calm Start

Calm Start

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The world outside my office window is brown and green and gray, a palette of soft colors for a foggy morning.

I woke to the sound of an early bird, a cardinal perhaps. But since that first song it’s been still and quiet, a calm start to what I hope is a calm weekend.

It’s time to get caught up on errands both inside and outside the house, time to collect myself before the changes to come.

The Unvoiced

The Unvoiced

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I read an essay over the weekend about the writer Tillie Olsen, whose impact was large though her output was small. It was that last point that comforted and inspired me. And not for the best of reasons. As I contemplate a life soon freed of the day job, I’m already looking for excuses. 

Before, I could always say … gee, I wish I could write more of my own stuff, but I have to work for my living. What will I use for an excuse now? This essay, by A. O. Scott in the New York Times Book Review, provides a blueprint. I’m going to quote liberally from it, because it articulates an exhaustion I’ve long felt but seldom read about. The italics are mine.  

Olsen was a writer her whole life — she died in 2007 — but she didn’t write much. Not because she was blocked or lacked material. The blockage — the obligation of earning a living and tending children, the “immersion” in caring that was a source of fulfillment as well as frustration — was the subject matter. The silence that surrounds those stories is its own kind of statement.

Is there a place in literature — in our canons and course listings, in our criticism and theory — for unwritten work? … Literary ethics prompts us to attend to the unheard and the marginal; curiosity or impatience with the same old stuff sends us in search of the forgotten and the neglected. But what kind of attention do we owe — what kind of attention is it even possible to pay — to the unvoiced?

I’d have to go back to an essay by Ursula Le Guin, “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Writes the Books,”  to find words that so perfectly describe the unique challenges facing the woman who raises children, makes a home, holds a job and dares call herself a writer. 

It’s a topic I soon hope to explore with renewed relish — or at least, that’s the plan.