May 12, 2024
Lights And Shadows
Before my wife and I went to bed last night, we made plans to wake up early and go eat breakfast at the Cracker Barrel in Wilson. When my watch alarmed buzzed, we both woke up feeling rested and excited. We still had our morning coffee together, but soon after, we got dressed to leave the house for breakfast.
It was Mother’s Day weekend, and people packed the restaurant, dressed in their Sunday’s best. The place was a little loud, but the pancakes with whipped butter and maple syrup made up for any inconveniences. After we ate, we drove to Target to pick up a new hairdryer for my wife. Her old one died a few days ago, and she needed a new one before leaving for work on Monday.
After Target, we stopped to fill her tank with gas and then made the drive home. The day was bright, with large puffy cumulus clouds stacked in rows against the blue sky. Each row extended vertically, creating a mesmerizing view. When we got home, my wife had plans to pressure wash the back of the house, and I had plans to write before joining her in some yard work.
Writing, these days, was a quick and effortless affair. Last year, on November 29th, I wrote my first journal entry, stating that I thought it was a good day to start a public journal. Today, one hundred and sixty-five days later, I cleared one hundred and fifty thousand words in this journal, which equated to a five hundred page book. Writing daily and then posting it online had been a really positive experience, and my goal to journal publicly for a year seemed doable, even though I would end up with over a thousand pages of writing.
After finishing today’s writing session, I went outside where my wife showed me her handiwork. The back of the house was completely clean, looking bright white against the house’s black accents. Outdoor chores like this were one of my wife’s favorite ways to detach from her studies, and I always appreciated how nice she kept the house looking. It was constantly getting cuter, just like her.
I put on some work gloves, slipped on my boots, and headed out the front door to the barn. I started the riding mower and mowed the front yard and a large parking area that had once been covered with small rocks. Grass and wildflowers had long since overgrown it. While I mowed, my wife took sheers and cut tree limbs that extended from the southern border of our property to the fence’s pasture. The branches had grown long, making it difficult to get the lawn mower through to cut the grass that grew between the tree and fence lines. After she finished, I mowed the area and continued along the sides of our dirt road, looping around to the south side of the pine grove.
While mowing, I saw a man in a truck working in the neighbor’s house that was for sale. The neighbors moved out this weekend, and I wondered if the man was our new neighbor or if he was doing some repairs for the new owners. While my wife was cutting more branches, I stopped the mower, and she faced me with a look of desperation. In a strained voice, she expressed how hot, thirsty, and, above all, hungry she was. I smiled at her little red face, knowing she needed food, and fast. I put the mower in the barn and whisked her away to Wilson for lunch.
We went through the drive through at Panera and then found a spot under a shade tree, where we parked and ate lunch inside the car. This was one of my favorite things to do. My wife put on some music by John Prine, and we ate our food, talking about everything under the sun. Anytime we were together, we found something to laugh about. The food nourished our bodies, while the humor nourished our souls. We loved to eat and laugh, and we were great at doing both.
After eating lunch, I drove my wife to Culver’s, where we ordered ice cream, mine in a cup and hers in a waffle cone. We both had the flavor of the day, volcano something or other. It was a scoop of chocolate ice cream with M&M’s, crushed Oreo cookies, and chocolate syrup. It was pretty tasty. With all the food and sugar, I knew a nap was imminent.
When we arrived home, my wife put me to sleep on the couch. Bodhi, who was always cold, slept next to me, cuddled up, keeping warm. My wife studied and worked around the house while I drifted off into the abyss. I woke up an hour later feeling rested, but extremely groggy. I made a cup of coffee and took it outside, first sitting on the porch under the pergola, and later moving to a shaded area in the garden.
Last year, we made this small sitting space with a garden. It was a fenced, square-shaped area with garden beds on three sides, shaped like a horseshoe. In the middle, we covered the ground with white rocks, built a fire pit into the ground, and added two chairs where we could sit and relax. At this time of day, cool shade covered the entire area. I sipped on my coffee and within a few minutes of being outside, my wife joined me, toting Kilo and Bodhi along. We both laughed as Bodhi pawed at a stick, thinking it was an animate object. He would touch it with his extended paw carefully and then jump back as if the stick had tried to attack him. His act was so convincing that we wondered if there was a snake on the ground, so we got up to check. Yup, just a stick and a schtick.
Later in the evening, we ate dinner together on the deck, enjoying the perfect weather. The weekend was coming to a close, and we both knew that tomorrow we would have to be adults once again. My wife would be away from home in Cary for the week while I stayed here, taking care of our four furry children. While this always made us feel melancholy, we both saw the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. She only had two more weeks in this rotation, and then our time apart would be over.
Life was always full of ups and downs. It was not something entirely under our control. In fact, I believed very little of it was. We could only learn to control our responses to the cards life dealt us. Some times were going to be difficult, others easy, while still others were neither of those two things. The secret, I presumed, was to embrace it all together as a single package, because that’s exactly what life was.
Sometimes, in my odd imagination, I liked to think we had all signed up to be born. That in some other time and dimension, we had the chance to experience the game of a lifetime. It would be full of love and light, but it would also come with pain and darkness. And I liked to think that after weighing the proposition, we made the leap, paid our fee, and got zapped into our birth, this human experience we called life.
So far, I felt like I was getting my money’s worth. While the difficult times in life were no fun, they gave perspective and meaning to all the great things life offered. Along my path, most of the darkness was behind me, and my future looked bright ahead. Maybe this game was one big metaphor that taught us about who we were as individuals. We all had lights and shadows, and we could either become consumed by them, or we could learn to bring their effect on us under our control. Our life gave us a unique opportunity to use the sum of our experiences to create something that was meaningful and aesthetically pleasing.