Taking It Easy

by Donna Schoenkopf

I feel like I have truly begun my retirement.

Free.

No Holy Obligations. All debts paid. Sort of.

I am not substitute teaching. It is summertime. I wonder if I’ll go back this fall. But the summer is free. I can do whatever I want with the day.

Starting with getting up in the morning.

Now I get up when the spirit moves me.

Some mornings Che the Cat galumphs over me about every three minutes on his remaining three legs. He goes just fast enough to escape my flailing arms and hands. He does this until I open my eyes and get up to feed him and Rosie the Cat. (SHE sits politely and waits patiently. And looks at me with loving eyes. Being at Orval’s house for four months has made her appreciate me, her benefactor.)

In any event, the manner in which I get up is very, very important to me. It is the single most important reason I retired. And, through careful scientific surveying, I have discovered that virtually everyone I’ve asked feels the same way.

We all want to get up when we damn well feel like it.

The luxury of it is deep and relaxing and starts the day off with gentleness and smoothness.

I still rise early, though. Long ago I discovered my Lark Self. There is nothing so beautiful to me as the morning.

And I stay up late if I want to.

Then I take naps. It is relatively new to me to do. I’d taken five or six in my entire life. I never liked them because I felt crabby and out of my body when I woke up from them.

But not now. I lie down on my cool bed, feel the breeze over me, the quiet of the afternoon lulling me to sleep. Nice.

After a while, a prickle of consciousness, and I move slowly into the active world again.

cottonwood

My freedom is real now because I choose when to eat, sleep, go to town, what to clean, mow, plant, where to go and where to put things.

It has taken me a month to really feel the time and space around me and gather the energy to do things.

A week ago I began some projects I’d wanted to do and, along with the projects, I found out things I didn’t know before.

I discovered the miracle of shade. I’m sure everyone appreciates shade, but I have felt it more intensely than I’ve ever felt before. The top of the hill where my house sits is barren except for a huge cottonwood tree which is so tall and placed so perfectly that the whole southern side of my house, all sixty feet, is shaded all morning and into the afternoon. Then the sun, lower in the western sky, throws cottonwood’s shadow down the other side of the hill.

I first saw the cottonwood tree when it was a sapling of about eight feet, six years ago. It was the only tree on the bluff. I knew exactly where it would be in relation to my someday-to-be house. I thought it would be twenty years before it was of any size. Six years later, it towers above my house.

Woodpeckers, hummingbirds, cardinals, finches love this tree. Rosie doesn’t go up it anymore because the dogs lounge under it in the thick, soft, green grass. They just can’t resist chasing small, furry animals zipping up a tree. Che used to run up the tree, full speed, but not anymore, being three-legged and all.

I want more trees up here. Cottonwoods, mostly. And a redbud. I already have a willow.

Cottonwoods dance all day long. The barest hint of a breeze sets their leaves fluttering. You can tell the direction of the wind, the velocity, the shifts. It’s very, very pretty.

Cottonwoods are soft trees. Their branches are willowy and slender, their wood breaks easily in winds and heavy rain.

And, Neighbor Orval says, lightning doesn’t strike it. Or willow trees. Funny. Those are the only two species I’ve planted so far, and they both are lightning-proof. Hah!

I have planted six cottonwood saplings so far. I shall have a shady, green yard here. And a shady, cool house.

I want a redbud tree for my east yard because when you walk through the front door of my house you can see straight through the whole house out to the east yard, and, because the sun gets very hot on that side in the morning, I realized I needed a nice shade tree out there for shade. A pretty shade tree. A flowering shade tree. Delicate and sweet. A redbud would be perfect.

It is 9:30 in the morning. I think of the redbuds in my forest. I know they are there because the splashes of purple/pink in the spring spray against the greens of the other trees. I walk down my east hill into the shady forest and find, not far from the graceful Mother Tree, two redbud saplings. They are nestled in the middle of some briars and, yikes! Not far away, a clump of poison ivy.

But I am Woman, hear me roar!

I think a bit and it occurs to me that I might be able to just pull one out of the ground because the earth is so soft in the forest, so I gently wrap my fingers around its slender trunk (no bigger than a linguine strand.)

No dice.

Pull harder. Nope. HARDER! Nothing. Both hands. Nada.

So I trudge up the hill and get my handy little shovel, walk back into the forest, skirt my way around the poison ivy, stand on the briars to keep them out of my way, and start pushing that shovel into the soft earth. But no matter how I try, I can’t dislodge that sapling. Its taproot must be waaaay down there. I find another sapling and work on that one. Still no luck. In fact, I push the shovel handle down so hard as a lever trying to pry that tree out of the ground that the handle breaks.

And so, because I am retired and can do ANYTHING I want, I leave.

I am Woman, see me LEAVE!

Hah!

redbud

But I don’t want to go inside yet. Even though sweat is rolling off the tip of my nose and down my neck and my clothes are plastered to my body, I still want to work outside.

I walk over to my outdoor water pump, find my long, long, LONG hose, and start my daily watering. As I water I realize my hedges have grown barely an inch since last year but bermuda, crab, and Johnson grass is filling in the red clay ground.

(Neighbor Orval says that Johnson grass develops a poison when it freezes that’ll kill your cattle, but that it’s good feed other than that, and when you keep it cut short it’s tender and green and makes a thick, soft, beautiful lawn.)

A mound of purple clover, a foot tall, blooms in the middle of the west yard.

Black-eyed Susans are scattered all over the south and west yards. I refuse to mow them. They bloomed after the masses of fleabane, which are tall bouquets of tiny white flowers, had finally seeded and dried up.

Watering done, I go out to the plumeria tree Rebecca brought me from Hawaii. It has really grown. I feel in the mood to repot it, so I get my electric drill out of my tool drawer with its little bit in its jaws so I can drill a hole in the bottom of the pot for drainage. But when I get out to the deck and look at the drill, the bit is gone. I look everywhere and realize it must have fallen through the cracks in the deck. Damn. I trudge out to the shed and find my jar of screws and drill bits and trudge back and fit the drill bit into the drill and make several nice holes in the bottom of the pot.

I get a large plastic bowl and walk out to the remains of my gravel pile, fill the bowl and carry it to the new plumeria pot and dump it in. Then I hoist up the fifty pound bag of potting soil from the east yard, stagger over to the south yard, scoop the soil out of the bag with my hands, and fill in the spaces around the plumeria.

I drench it with cool water.

I stand back and look at it.

Gorgeous.

I walk around the house to the north yard to check out the morning glories that grow in the hot, hard clay there. I had nicked the seeds a month ago and soaked them (as required) and must have spilled a bunch of them out there in No Man’s Land when I went to plant some around my shed. And there they are ... perky little patches of heart shaped leaves poking up through the ground. I transplanted about a dozen or so clumps to the north wall of my house a week ago. They love it there.

I go back to my south deck and look down at my pond. All of a sudden a huge fish, curved body arching in the air, leaps out of the water. It’s summertime and the fish are jumpin’!

I am done. Time for a cool outdoor shower. Sweaty clothes off. Under the water I go. Ahhhhhh. I love this shower.

I take the towel from the outdoor hook, go into the house and look at my skin. I count thirty-seven insect bites on my body:

• I have chigger bites on the tops of my feet because I won’t wear closed shoes and socks when I’m working in the yard. I love Crocs so much I cannot do without them, chiggers or not.
• I have tick bites from the dogs. They take forever to heal.
• I have mosquito bites from mosquitoes that don’t buzz. Neighbor Orval confirmed my observation. He is as amazed as I am by this new phenomenon. Mosquitoes that don’t buzz. Evolution?

I put on fresh, clean clothes, sit down on my sofa and pick up my Cuban book of woodcuts. Daughter Rebecca brought it to me from Cuba. She found an old bookseller in a tiny bookstall in Old Habana. She thought of me and my romantic feelings for Fidel and Che and the Revolution. And there, lying on a makeshift table in that cubby hole of a bookstore, was a book with a red and black cover of Fidel and El Moncada. Slick pages with ninety-five woodcuts by Antonio Canet. His style is strong. Intense black lines form faces, clothing, clouds, guns, children. It is the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution that he commemorates. Every page is magnificent. It is all in Spanish, but I can glean a vague understanding from the captions. I play “Hasta Siempre Comandante” as I look at the pages.

I feel a little hungry so I go to the kitchen and saute onions and my own homegrown tomatoes in olive oil with an egg cracked over them. The whole thing is seasoned with sea salt and garlic. I grate some mozzarella over the top. Mmmmmm.

I’m a little sleepy. I lie down on my cool, white bed, under the spinning ceiling fan, and drop into a sweet sleep.

After a half hour or so I wake up slowly and peacefully and walk over to this computer and start my story.

Let’s see. How shall I begin ...

where the book came from

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