For days now, I’ve been battling with the forces of writer’s block and going blue in the face trying to unload some sort of quality alphabet shaped like a column.
My neck of the woods continues to brim with “believe it or not” episodes that make for literary fodder, but for whatever reason, my ability to translate that to the written word this week has struck out.
The weather always has a conversation dangling from its mouth. Let’s start with that. I’m not ready for fall, cold weather, early sunsets and turning on the furnace. There is something about this time of year that makes me stop and look around a little more carefully for that bottle of red wine I always have on hand to help usher in a little warmth and inspiration.
Found it.
The trees have begun their annual transformation, turning from summer green to gold far too quickly for my liking. They trickle to the ground in droves in the most inconvenient places, including in front of the steps to the house where they wait patiently to be transported on the bottoms of my shoes and the cat’s paws into the porch and beyond. They collect in ditches and along the field pathway I’ve kept mowed all summer, and around my old workshop that has stood through countless seasons before this one, unfazed by what’s nearly upon us.
Fall has a way of reminding me that things don’t always happen on my schedule. I am discovering this as I try to finish my spring projects that leaked onto the summer projects list. And that list has now morphed into a huge fall projects endeavour with a running time clock akin to the two-minute warning at a football game.
One of those bigger projects is the barn. The G man and I have been shoring up an inside wall, and I have discovered that two people can look at exactly the same piece of wood, wall or problem and see two entirely different things. Sometimes I simply cannot see what he sees as the solution.
It can be frustrating and enlightening depending on whether I have a full stomach or I’m starving, because food definitely affects my ability to be logical. Most of the time I am learning to step back and try to see the guts of the project from his side—unless he heads to the workshop for a wrench and then I try to do it my way and pretend I didn’t touch anything when he returns.
Meanwhile, Earl has been conducting his own projects. The cream-coloured cat has taken to trotting down to my mom’s house, some 15 country acres away, where he spends the entire day investigating her yard. I know this because when I leave her house, sometimes there he is waiting for me.
We walk home together through the field. He leads me through the long grass like a little four-legged border collie herding a lost sheep, occasionally lying down ahead of me and looking back to make sure I’m still coming. I cannot help but worry about him, and I’m seriously considering buying him a GoPro camera and strapping it to his back so that I can record his adventurous life.
A cream-coloured cat crossing an open field is not exactly invisible, and I’m sure the eagle has noticed him too. Murphy’s Law would dictate that said camera would show him flying across the open sky headed for the nest at the top of a very tall tree. I grill Earl every morning when he trots off on his Huckleberry adventures about the dangers in the sky and cross my fingers he understands me.
I have my own adventure awaiting me in the outside attic of my house. I haven’t been up there for nearly three years. One day, when I am truly bored and apparently have nothing better to do, I will climb up there and see what has been going on in my absence. I suspect I will find the picked-clean carcasses of several mice that met their destiny in the traps. It will be an archaeological expedition of sorts or maybe a show and tell for my “believe it or not” column.
Perhaps by then the leaves will have finished falling, the summer projects will officially be fall ones, and the fall ones will probably become snowy projects. And the barn will still be standing for another winter.
Maybe that is my lesson of the season. I don’t always get everything done. Sometimes I just do what I can, look at things from a different angle, follow the cat home through the field, gaze upon the splendour of a place I am so lucky to call home, and let the rest wait for another day.
