Standstill

 It's a beautiful warm day here, a thin layer of white overcast that hasn't overcome the sun.  I've had lunch, after a brief return to the library, then the grocery store for something I could microwave (my only appliance available at the moment).  Now I am in my rocker on the porch enjoying quiet.  There are still items on today's list to do, but I have come to a stop.

As has everything else round me.

The kitchen backsplash, the kitchen floor, the stone patio...nary a motion detected on any.  The backsplash, which my nephew Bob worked on for hours til late last night, is on hold due to child-care issues...understandable, considering.  

The flooring, which was ordered six or seven weeks ago (I have stopped counting) just came in last Friday, but the floorman Doug is still on his way back from taking his father to New York for the summer...also understandable. 

 As for the patio, which is my own task, that is halted for lack of inspiration:  I can't seem to come up with a viable plan, or the effort to think of one.  Stones lie pathetic in the pattern of yesterday, unsatisfactory, insufficient, unacceptable.

It doesn't help that after a sound, healthy sleep two nights ago, I managed only four hours last night.  Nothing pressing kept my mind buzzing; no caffeine kept me sleepless. Last evening, after Bob left, I read for a while an innocuous, rather self-aggrandizing novel by the otherwise brilliant writer MFK Fisher, yawning my way to lights out by ten or so.  At nearly midnight I tried the best thing I know for sleeplessness...Yogi Stress-Release tea, a honey and lavender blend...and though I began to yawn again, closing my eyes gently in anticipation of rest, it evaded me still.  All I could do was wait it out, as I listened to the clock strike one three times.  I woke a bit after five.  

This morning, I checked my list every few minutes for something to distract me from this ennui, and went about a few unimportant assays that weren't even on it...lackluster is the kindest description of what got me through lunch (gnocchi cooked in vegetable broth with collards and the leftovers of orange-celery salad). 

Thereafter I began to yawn again.  The porch on a quiet day has that effect, to be sure, not to mention a soporific lunch, but it seemed to me that in order to avoid a sense of guilt about doing nothing (not to mention an anxious walk past my topsy-turvy kitchen), I could haul myself out of the rocker to find my laptop and write.  If things were at so dead a stop, my fingers could nonetheless write about it.  As excuses go, I think this takes a prize, don't you?

I'd love to have written in buoyant tones, with pictures of my newly revived house, but alas, the photos here illustrate well only the notion of nothing doing.

Maybe in a while I will take a walk, where I haven't the energy to guess.  Still, it is a nice day, with a breeze that could entice me into it...if even that hadn't come to a standstill.

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Postscript:

There is something about the release of words that creates its own energy.  Did I go for a walk?  Not exactly.

Instead, as I closed my laptop, I looked out over the front slope and remembered an item on my list:  to move two lorapetalum from the dark of the side yard to the front where their own dark shade would be a pleasing, I hoped, foil to all the greenery.  

I stood up, slipped into my work shoes, went for the maddock and began to chop roots, dig up stones, free earth.  I filled the watering can.  I pulled out the first lorapetalum and plunked it in the new hole, piling up dirt around it and then pouring on water.  Cathy, working at transplanting in her yard across the street, came over, carrying her gardenia on a shovel. We conferred.  I did the second lorapetalum, and then drove to Southern States for good soil.

When I returned, on the front porch was a large box marked "Glass! Handle with care!" So I filled in the new dirt, washed up and tackled the frame I'd ordered for a monoprint I'd bought years ago from the Print Council exhibit to hang in the front room.  It fit perfectly.

Meanwhile a second package landed at the kitchen door:  twin overhead lamps for the workroom.  I assembled them, as easily as the frame, and gathered tools for hanging them.  I knew, though, that by that time...the clock striking five...I wouldn't trust myself on a ladder.  (Perhaps some nice son or nephew or neighbor would come by and affix them to the ceiling for me?)

Back on the porch, I looked down this time, and a curry plant I'd bought and planted, without knowing really what it was, caught my attention.  Google helped.  Turns out it needs sun, prefers dryness, and blooms in summer with beautiful yellow flowerlets perfect for fall drying.  And here I'd been faithfully watering it...had it complained that it couldn't swim without my hearing?

Out I went again to move it to the front where other like things grow...bluestem grasses and such.  While in that corner, I gathered some displaced marigolds and fed them with new soil.  

Tools returned to the shed, inside I went, about to settle back on the porch when...

...this time on the kitchen steps, footsteps:  Cathy and Steve coming to help me with that stump of a patio.  And help they did, giving me two new perspectives, new rationale, making me question exactly what I wanted.  New eyes are the best at seeing what I cannot about my own yard.  Now I've choices for a decision.  But "Don't decide right now," advised Steve.

So standstill no longer seems the theme of the day.  Things best happen in their own times.  Here I am, where I started, tapping away, releasing words.  Perhaps I'll sleep better tonight.