To Do

It's summertime. I know this because I changed the calendar page to July the other day. It's also after my birthday, the traditional and somewhat scientific start to the season: the solstice. It's also about time for me to start feeling this vacation thing. It's been a couple of weeks already, and I'm still waking up with a start at six in the morning, certain that I am missing out on something. A responsibility of mine has somehow gone unchecked or forgotten. I spend the next hour or two soothing my jangled nerves and assuring my wife that I have not gone nuts. Further nuts.
It is about the architecture of my day. I tend to build from the solid base that is my job, and spread out from there. Having a job is all kinds of security for me since I have such limited imagination when it comes to things that I can do. Should do. Need to do. I like that sense of purpose. The kind of purpose that generates its own "to-do list." When I get into those vacation blurs, I try and create my own must-dos. That's why I have sanded and painted the front and back porch and steps. I have cleaned the oven. I have cleaned the grout in the bathroom tile. The plum tree out front is calling with its absurd extra branches and weed-like growth.
Every morning I get up and go for a run. I come home and write a blog. I have lunch. Then the rest of the day stretches out before me. And I think of wife and how she is able to create islands of activity in the midst of what appears to me as chaos. Events just spring up. A few quick phone calls and she is off to this or that. Sometimes work. Sometimes social. Sometimes both. Morning, noon and night, it's going on. How does she do that?
She is an evolved being. That's all I can take away from this. She doesn't need someone to set an agenda for her. She can make stuff up to do that doesn't even have to be done. Meanwhile, I look with suspicion at that front gate, and the way it's hanging just a little low. And those blackberries aren't going to clear themselves. That's when I breathe a sigh of relief. Thank heavens for something else to do.