NOTHING HAPPENED

Yesterday evening, as my Ladylove and I sat on the deck, watching the sun disappear and the sky go through its wondrous cycle of gold to orange to vermilion to amethyst to indigo, I thought over the weekend and tried to decide what I might write about for this post. Nothing obvious sprang to mind.

On Saturday, I spent most of the day moving cut slabs of Indiana limestone from their storage pile close to the drive to the yard near the front of the cottage, where I'm fiddling with an ongoing project. The idea is to use the materials I have on hand, rather than buying stuff, to construct a sort of wide walkway in front of the side deck and around the riverside corner of the cottage to the front deck.

These chunks of smooth rock—squares, rectangles, triangles, and every other shape you can think of, including lots with broken-off portions—are anywhere from the size of a very large dinner plate to half a desktop, and 2 to 6 inches thick. The ones I can lift I bring down in the wheelbarrow; the ones I can't I coax along with rollers and a crowbar. Fitting them is like working a giant patchwork puzzle. It helps if you have a high tolerance for back pain and an eye for spatial relationships, as hundred-pound blocks aren't the easiest thing to jocky around.

I did take one walk in the afternoon—about a thirty minute break to a low floodplain portion of riverside woods a half mile below the cottage. Lesser celandine have been in bloom locally for a couple of weeks. This stretch is always a riot of bright yellow flowers, and as they're already starting to fade, I wanted to make a quick visit before the show ended.

So that was Saturday.

Sunday after church, my Ladylove and I did nothing other than a few light chores and a lot of lazing around outside in the lovely warm sun. I tended some slow-cooked pork barbecue, read, snoozed, and watched clouds, birds, and the river as it purled along—green, cheerful, as if excited to be dancing southward on a springtime adventure. Moon the dog wallowed in the grass. My Laydylove, who loves the sun—and the brighter-'n-hotter the better—stretched out on the chaise lounge and promptly went to sleep.

Late in the day we had our supper of smoky pulled pork—laced liberally with my tangy-sweet sauce—a big salad, and an after-dinner cappuccino. And that was pretty much the whole of Sunday. So…what to write about?

It was now all but night. The vultures had been settled on their roost for an hour. A couple of robins were trading riffs in the gathering darkness. High in the western sky a jetliner cruised—a wink of silver dragging a vapor tail the color of blood.

"What am I going to write about," I said. "Nothing interesting happened."

"Don't be silly," said Myladylove, "that's interesting…write how nothing happened."

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