too happy

“I’m too…happy,” a friend told me when I asked her if she’d written anything lately. “It’s hard to write when you have, happy husband, happy children, happy life…” I thought about her and her lack of writing-inducing angst this morning.

As the sun came up over the tall trees that form the rim of my world, I was walking back up the gravel driveway toward the house. It needs a new roof, I thought. The chickens need water, I thought. The kids’ll be up soon, I thought. Many things that need tending. Every day a day’s worth of the kind of work that makes lives run, builds the framework of memories.

Breathe in, breathe out. Wake up, go to sleep. Make meals, clean up. Wash clothes, wear them, wash them again. Nothing new, nothing earth-shattering. I’m with her. What’s to write about?

Only this:

-In my corner of Georgia summer has melted into fall. The air is cold at dawn and dusk, turning to crisp in between. All the outdoor projects that have waited through the blistering, steamy months are suddenly possible. I put lovely new paint on all my shutters one breezy afternoon this week.

-Today I sat on the edge of one of the garden boxes and planted the fall garden. (Don’t do as I have done, I’m very late.) Cabbage, kohlrabi, bok choi, brussels sprouts, turnips, radishes, lettuce. My toddler sang and shoveled soil out of the boxes onto the ground, and it was a lovely garden day. All we had to pay for this beautiful moment was four packs of seeds dumped on the kitchen floor and cabinets painted white with latex paint and a broom.

-I took some of those nasty boards from the dining room floor and sawed, sanded, screwed, painted them up into two picket-fence headboards for Katie’s room. Got them all in there, went to get the bed frames I had in the garage, and found that they’re not the kind of bed frames that have feet. So…now I have two pretty fences sitting against the wall in that room there and the kids are scratching their heads about their crazy mother.

So that’s it. Nothing particular is going on, but life as usual. Which all by itself is a blessing. I promise to let you all know when I have a moment’s worth of angst worth philosophizing over. But for now, it’s good, in its way, to be too happy to write.