This is the End of My Day

I am sitting on a tall chair covered with gray fabric at the end of the island in our kitchen. Sounds around me are muted—the hum of the refrigerator, the soft tap-tap-tap of my fingers at the keyboard. I see the shadows lengthening across my brick patio, letting me know the day is coming to an end. Not quite yet, but close—closer than this morning, when the sun was moving skyward like a roller coaster on its slow ascent, when I was all motion and purpose. 

I suppose I can say it was a productive day, what with phone calls made, mulch scattered around my flower beds, and freshly washed sheets just folded. My reward is a bowl of popcorn, some kernels sprinkled with cheese and others glazed with caramel, made by a local company I discovered at a farmer’s market last weekend. That morning my husband and I filled four grocery bags with goodies for our pantry—deep purple eggplant, two dozen fresh eggs, heirloom cherry tomatoes. We bought a brown paper bag full of mushrooms grown and harvested by the man running the booth. We felt like we’d won the lottery.

My husband and I haven’t had more than a week alone since the beginning of summer. By mid-June, our calendar had exploded like popcorn, with invitations, requests and ideas flying criss-cross around the country to and from family members. We wouldn’t normally have taken on as much as we did, but coming out of Covid, we decided to go for it and do as much as we could. Now that all of these plans are winding down, what I am most in awe of is the fact that it all worked. Planes departed and arrived on time. Weather was great. No one got sick. No one got as much as a bee sting. I find this to be a great and miraculous thing, something not to be taken for granted.

Notes from The Rocket, my first book in three years, is now at the printer. I am currently in the process of organizing all the little goodies and ephemera that will be tucked into the book. It is quiet work, and slightly tedious, but I have an affinity for those sorts of tasks. It is precise work, and methodical; it lends itself to a certain kind of meditation. I’m looking forward to sitting down with a big stack of books and doing all the work to make each and every one unique, to imbue each book with something of my love of the creative process and my longing to make meaning of this life that I’ve been given.

I was at the dog park yesterday, which has a big field where dogs can run around and play as well as a trail that circles the entire park. As we came around the last bend on our way back to the parking lot, I looked up and noticed the leaves of a few aspen trees waving frantically in the breeze. They were moving back and forth so quickly the trees began to look, if I unfocused my eyes just enough, like a pointillist painting, á la George Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. I stopped and watched them for a few minutes, wanting to hold on to the image, to capture the feelings their movement was conjuring, which was somewhere between playful joy and profound gratitude. “Look at us!”, the leaves seemed to say, “Look at this amazing day! Feel this amazing moment!” 

It made me think of one of the many quotes from The Color Purple that I’ve carried around in my heart ever since I first read the book in my early twenties. It was spoken by a character named Shug, who was talking to another character about God: “Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?” Those trees at the dog park weren’t begging for my attention, but inviting me to give it to them freely. How many such invitations do I miss throughout each day because I insist on locking my attention in any number of cages—the ones that hold my to do lists and my worries; the ones that hold all the big and little annoyances from yesterday or last week or twelve years ago? 

The light outside is changing. The white brilliance of the afternoon sun is giving way to that perfect, soft shine, the one that makes every flower petal, bird wing, and fence post look drenched in gold. The trees are barely fluttering. The ruckus and chatter around the bird feeder has settled down. On the counter, overripe bananas are reclining as if in a hammock, keeping company with a lemon, an onion, and garlic. This is the end of my day, the first gentle steps toward sleep, the invitation to rest and exhale.