I Heard a Rumble

 

Wasted labor.  All the more aching when you’re busy and behind on an inert pile things.  Hot.  Clichéd perhaps but it was hot and sultry outside.  My arm is still a scabby mess after my napalm-like encounter with poison ivy last week, so I wore a long-sleeved shirt over at the Galleria Mall in Poughkeepsie.  A hot, slow day like this in a mall can make you question why it is you’re in America. Everyone seems defensive and calculating.  Everything seems too expensive and too simple.  I caught the eye of the a guy my age behind the counter at Pearl Vision and he asked how I was doing and affirming I was alright I returned the inquiry: “Livin’ the dream” he said and somehow it stung.  I felt so sad. 

 

Back home I wanted to nap.  But I also wanted to exercise.  And I needed to call someone who I overlooked calling earlier in the day.  We had a good chat and my daughter’s lined up one-by-one on the couch, on the bed to get my help on things once they were done.  The younger one is writing a paper on Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”  I suggested a book on King Leopold and a few other’s I read last year.  And the older one needed my steady hand of concurrence on her flight to Italy for the Fall.  Another gent who’d been waiting to talk to me, half way around the world suggested he was heading to bed, when I told him I was finally free. 

And with that there was nothing left to prevent me from getting my exercise.  Rather than take a long bike ride, I decided I’d mow the lower lawn.  It wasn’t so long ago since the last time I did this, but clearly it was shaggy and scraggly and in need of a trim.  An hour’s worth of lawn mowing, and I’d be a sweaty mess, just as if I’d biked around.  I set the mower low, so as to buzz the cut as short as it would stand and the fickle battery powered mower lasted for all the job I set out to do and only called it quits when I was starting a new section.

Tired, I still had energy to water some of the trees I’d recently planted.  The few I’d passed in the back weren’t looking so great.  They seemed dry.  I tried to calculate how long it had been since we had rain.  Nothing came to mind.  So I filled up two watering cans and headed around giving my tree plantings a drink.  Then I went around the back and turned on the hose there. Around the time I was finishing up, I heard a rumble and noticed it wouldn’t be long before it would rain. 

 

Rain it did. Ferociously. There’s a pleasant sunset now. The rain’s gone. But I needn’t have watered anything.  It was a waste of time.

Tuesday, 07/27/21