SWEET TIME

Since returning home from my six-day sortie to the Sunshine State, I’ve been trying to play catch-up with all the outdoor chores I should have completed before I left…plus a proliferation of new tasks, some of which literally materialize overnight. Spring is now in its final mad-dash charge towards summer. The magic of ample rain and a wealth of warm sunlight is visible everywhere. What was a nicely greening landscape before I left has become a lush jungle during my absence—and it grows more jungly by the hour. My daily work list has been daunting, if not at times overwhelming. So far, nature and personal ennui are winning. How can a man who is responsibility-challenged at the best of times bring himself to toil away every wonderful hour, when May’s air is sweet and laden with the honeyed scent of black locust in bloom on the hill, and the river, its water sparkling and infused with green light, burbles gently over shining riffle stones? How can I be expected to unceasingly bend my back to the shovel and rake when all I really want to do is laze on the riverbank and watch my island buzzards wheel high in the oh-so-blue sky on rising thermals, and listen while the Carolina wren sings sweet nothings from the hackberry? I’m not to be trusted at making such decisions. Which is why, lacking the fortitude to ignore such temptations completely, I’ve vacillated between mowing grass and smelling roses; digging out a marigold bed and watching the pileated woodpeckers; building a small wooden deck for the back door area and laughing at a pair of groundhogs chasing each other around the yard. I say one must insist on maintaining a certain balance in these matters! The problem is there’s simply never enough time for everything—work and pleasure. In spite of all our modern cleverness, mankind has not managed to give himself a minute’s more time. The forms of labor have changed, certainly. And I wouldn’t want to relinquish such things as modern medicine, electricity (and the Internet), and a few other things which actually help or enrich our lives. But when you figure in job, a bit of overtime—paid or not, a daily commute to and from work, an hour or so to ready yourself to survive your day, meal preparation, the necessary off-work hours consumed by home maintenance and toys such as cars and pools, shopping, social commitments, et cetera…are we any more free than my great-great-great-great grandfather? Or did that old man—born in Ireland in 1756, who fought in the Revolutionary War and then followed Daniel Boone down the Wilderness Road to claim a piece of wild mountain land which he cleared, and where for the remainder of his long life he earned his bread by the sweat of his brow, following a big-eared mule behind a bull-tounged plow, breaking clods in fresh-turned earth—did he actually have a better life? More and more I believe he did. A few minutes from now I’ll fire up my new lawn mower and give the grass its second cutting of the week. While that noisy infernal combustion engine is roaring , I’ll be isolated from the lilt of birdsong and the whisper of river; the heady fragrance of lilac will be overpowered by exhaust fumes—and I’ll not even smell the new-cut grass until after I’ve shut off the power and my nostrils have had a minute or two to clear. My great grandfather would have smelled the turned earth as he worked, just as he would have breath in the scent of fresh-cut meadow grass as he swung a sharp-bladed scythe. He would have heard the birds in the thickets, or the chatter-bark of a fox squirrel on the hill. In a way, I believe, he would have lived within the fullness of time—not exactly its master, but not nearly so much its slave. My distant grandfather now lies sleeping on that same steep hillside which he once worked. Where the view from the top is of folded green mountains and a river which curls and winks around their base. Where birds sing and locust blooms and time is but a memory—a wisp of smoke on May’s sweet air. While I, alas, I must mow the grass…