Working outdoors

What struck me as I prepared for bed last night at ten o’clock wasn’t how physically exhausted I was but rather how for once, it seemed justified.

My life, especially my weekday life, especially my weekday life during the school year, tends to be very indoorsy. While it’s true that I go running outdoors 365 days a year –the U.S. Running Streak Association does allow running done on treadmills to qualify for its registry, but in my experience, most streak runners look on that option with contempt – on days the kids have school I’m done with my run by nine o’clock in the morning. And quite often I then sit indoors at my computer for most of the rest of the day. Often this spring Holly and I have gone for a little bike ride after school, and sometimes one or another of my family members will take a walk with me, but for the most part, I spent a lot of my time indoors.

And so sometimes when the typical middle-aged sense of physical fatigue sets in at around ten o’clock at night, I ask myself just what I’ve done to merit the sense of weariness. There were about six years in my life when I lugged children around for much of the day, and there were other phases of my life when I ran between six and thirteen miles some days. When I was in my twenties and living in Boston I walked a mile or so to and from work every day. In college I taught aerobics during the summer. All of those seem like good reasons to be tired at the end of the day in a way that going for a two-mile run and then sitting at my computer does not.

Yesterday, though, I once again had a good excuse, beyond being middle-aged. I’d spent three hours that afternoon helping my father bale and stack hay, which is challenging physical labor, and all of this on a sunny eighty-degree day. I deserve to feel tired, I told myself with a little bit of righteousness last night. I did actual manual labor all afternoon.

We spent the first hour transferring hay bales from the trailer to the barn. That’s a straightforward job that consists of little more than moderate lifting and carrying. The next step was a lot harder. I told my father I’d help him pick up bales from a field he’d already mowed and raked. This was something I’d never done before.

“Is there anything about this job I should know?” I asked him on the way over.

“Stack from the back of the trailer to the front,” he said. “And just do your best to keep up.”

I honestly had no idea what I was in for. Collecting bales involves my standing in the trailer while Dad pulls it with the tractor, which is equipped with a device that gathers the hay up and then catapults tied bales into the trailer. As I stood there holding onto the gate, the trailer rocking back and forth as we crossed the uneven terrain of the field, hay bales flew through the air. After about twenty minutes, I had such bad motion sickness that I had to get out of the trailer and walk. “I’ll pick up any bales that fall out,” I said, feeling fairly useless. Without me in the back, the hay bales still flew through the air and landed in the tractor; they just made a haphazard pattern, whereas previously I had been stacking them neatly.

As I walked through the field, sipped water, and tried to get my sense of equilibrium back, I reflected that I’d probably have either nightmares or a very mild case of post-traumatic stress syndrome from the experience of standing in the rocking tractor while hay bales catapulted toward me. It’s like an amusement park ride for the masochistic, I mused. Try to balance and not get sick while also being really scared by heavy objects flying through the air.

According to my father, my brother-in-law can do this same job while singing and dancing in the back of the trailer. That’s impressive, but we all have our strengths. I had to concede this wasn’t one of mine. Dad was understanding and said it didn’t really matter if the bales didn’t get stacked geometrically, though it didn’t help things any when I then backed the truck up to the trailer too fast and put a crease in the bumper.

All of that notwithstanding, it was good to be working outside for a change. As a writer, I spend far too much time sitting still peering at my screen. Trauma aside, getting outdoors on a hot sunny day to do something productive is a good idea. And I’m willing to try it again, this time knowing that balancing in the back of a rocking trailer while hay bales seem to hail down from the sky is just a normal part of the job.

Creative output

I asked Holly what she planned to do after dinner, during the thirty minutes or so before we needed to head upstairs together for reading and bathing.
“I’m going to write a play,” she answered.

“Wonderful idea!” I told her. Holly’s third grade teacher is a playwright and songwriter, and without overtly urging the kids to take up either pursuit, he has probably been responsible for many more creative efforts this year in our household and those of Holly’s classmates than might otherwise take place.

Holly sat down at the desktop computer in the family room while I started collecting dirty laundry. Five minutes later I saw her heading off to another part of the house. “The computer kept freezing,” she announced. “So I’m going to build a blanket fort instead.”

A blanket fort? I wanted to protest. What if Tennessee Williams or Eugene O’Neill or Thornton Wilder – or Shakespeare – had ever-so-nonchalantly decided to go build a blanket fort rather than write a play?

I don’t mean to suggest that my daughter belongs in that pantheon of playwrights, just that I was alarmed at how easily she abandoned her literary pursuits. To my mind, her intent to write a play was obviously much more important than any kind of fort-building, and it was unnerving to see her shrug off the plan so easily.

But at the same time, this is one of the most delightful aspects of children’s creativity: how they haven’t yet distinguished art from craft, creative endeavor from hobby, self-improvement from fun. In my mind, those delineations are always obvious. Going running is important; taking a walk is just for fun. Writing an article matters; writing a Facebook post is a frivolity. Making dinner matters; baking cookies is self-indulgent. And so on. Not that I don’t do the things in the latter category; I do all of those things, walk and write Facebook posts and bake cookies. Just that there’s always the foregone conclusion in my mind as to whether or not any given activity is truly worthwhile or just for fun.

Kids don’t think that way. I remember one summer afternoon when my niece, Phoebe, was about five and I was babysitting for her. She played in the sandbox for about fifteen minutes; then she decided to weed the garden. She knew how to weed a garden; she’d been helping her mother with that job all summer. But what was interesting to me was that from her behavior and her attitude, there was no clear difference between sandbox play and garden maintenance. To me, one was recreation and the other was labor, but to her, both were opportunities to have fun in the dirt.

Still, I didn’t want to give up quite so easily on Holly’s literary ambitions. “You can use my laptop if the desktop isn’t working,” I offered. She considered for a moment, and then I guess the muse called out to her, because she sat down at my laptop and worked for the next half-hour or so on her play. When she read it to me, it sounded like she’d done little more than establish the mood of the opening scene, with three characters having a few lines each of banter. “I’ll work on it more tomorrow,” Holly told me with satisfaction. “Now I’m going to work on my blanket fort.”

My friends who are engineers might say that it’s the blanket fort that’s the really important pursuit here, and the script is a mere amusement. Either way, it’s probably good that she wants to do both. As is true of most kids, her interests are diverse and her judgments about them are minimal. I would be wise to follow her example in both regards.