Saturday Night

Tonight is Saturday night. Tonight I wrestled down a copse of dead trees standing between us and the neighbors. I’m sitting here with a hair full of bark and glasses full of sawdust. I’m not sure what kind of trees they were. They were tall, providing privacy; now they’re just branches sticking into the earth. So easy to push over that all I had to do was wedge myself between the fence and the trees and give it a good nudge. Boom. Timber! Then I sawed the branches with an electric reciprocating sawinto manageable pieces, until my hands tired and I feared I’d cut off my leg. Cadillac was impressed with my brute force and said I should have taken a photo, but my camera was upstairs and I was too dirty to traipse across the house.

Meanwhile, Cadillac is replacing the garbage disposal. He’s handy, that Cadillac. He comes from a line of men who work with their hands. His grandpa was a carpenter, who built many of the houses around here after he emigrated from England in the 1940s, after the war. His dad was an electrical/mechanical engineer, an executive at power companies, but still did and does as much of his own car/yard/house work as possible. When Cadillac’s dad was young, he and Cadillac’s grandpa built a boat in their backyard– a seaworthy vessel that, for all anybody knows, is still moored someplace. So Grandpa passed this do-it-yourself ethic to his son who passed it to his own sons. Thus, even if we had loads of money, Cadillac would likely do most of this kind of work himself, because he can and it’s almost anathema to him to let somebody else do it.

I was thinking about his grandpa. About how he fought in WWII and Cadillac’s dad didn’t see him for six years, except for a few periods of leave. About how he and his little family just chugged on over from England and made a new life here. About my paternal grandfather, how he was a coal miner who lost a leg and had seven children in a tiny two-bedroom townhouse. About how the struggles we face today pretty much pale in comparison to the struggles our grandparents had. About how lucky we are to live where we live, instead of being born in a country full of Ebola or constant civil war or drug cartels trying to kill us. How much of this life is out of our control, and how generous the universe was to my family, I think. I must be grateful for what I have.

So some people might think I’m having a crappy Saturday night, full of chores. I’m really not. I’m pleased to have trees I can chop down, because they’re MY trees now. I’m glad to have a reciprocating saw, instead of chopping the trees by hand like Laura Ingalls Wilder. I’m grateful to have a garbage disposal to install, because we can afford to buy a new garbage disposal without worrying about it.

This mantra of gratitude has come grudgingly to me in the past. Don’t we all think, Oh, I should be out doing THIS and THAT, I should be actively worrying about a thousand things that are actually not in my sphere of influence. I’m getting better at letting all that go. Perhaps this is how one can be happy.

After Cadillac’s done installing the disposal, we’ll sit on the couch in my office/grown-up hideaway and drink gin and lemonades and maybe watch a movie on Netflix. And then I’ll go to bed, my muscles sore for once from actual labor, and hope that I sleep soundly.