June
It’s June, and we saw the first double-breasted seersucker of the season at the bird feeder. We were having morning coffee at a favorite spot in our house where we frequently practice awakening. The view slopes up and away the backyard with its rich green and several gardens of native wild flowers, herbs, and hollies, the new October Glory maple waiting to crown all with its orange-red umbrage in the fall.
The yard in its entirety is CP’s domain, horticultured attentively as it is. She is not given to my foolishness with bird’s names or much else, for that matter. But this morning the lightness of our being seemed more nourishing than usual as we anticipated working out at rehab the next hour. We had only yesterday got the pump going again in the leaden cistern with the spouting lion’s head and fixed the leak along one of its joints with duct tape. Public television’s Red Green, I thought, would be proud of us.
I had enough yard work on my resumé by the time I got out of high school and into college to keep me from pursuing anymore. I’ve never been of much help save to admire CP whose strength and alacrity with forty-pound bags of topsoil is amazing for her size. All of which serves her well at rehab where the treadmills, stationary bikes, and workout machines with all their pulleys and levers and weights and pocketa-pocketa remind me of Walter Mitty hard at work in Dr Frankenstein’s monster assembly lab.
This morning was no different. But I must confess that workout seems always better in retrospect than in anticipation. It is good that God gives us these carnations with which to recycle her spirit in the hope maybe of doing some good every once in a while, that is, as the Quakers might say, when the meeting is over and the service begins.