It is the best day ever! A Monday, full-on sun, and I’m not working yet. I smoked a five-pound pork shoulder on the bone and weeded, planted flowers, just poured a beer and it’s only 3. The girls are watching TV and just finished their take-out. I got Dawn’s car fixed after getting it attached to a small tree in Oregon. Red-breasted robins are making a shit-show out of the cherry tree. I hung a second hummingbird feeder but spilled sugar water on myself. Played the new Neil Young record again which isn’t really new, but it is to me. It is possibly the last Monday that I won’t be employed this whole summer and it’s sunny, and I’m trying to relax but it’s hard. I’m hoping the beer will guide me to the hammock to doze off to the sound of birds tweeting, to Neil Young’s harmonica, to the jingle of bells around my cat’s neck and then, to pulled pork.

The bottom of our recycling tote has a hole in it like a mouth but we jam so much content in it’s too dense for anything to fall out. But it’s a peephole into the seedy underbelly of our lives, like emptying the girls’ trash cans. How they really live. And the looks of astonishment when I ask if they’d empty it themselves! The thought that trash cans are like magic portals where you just drop something in and watch it disappear, a magic hat.

They were inside watching TV on a day like this and who was I to stop them. I had free, streaming jazz and the better part of a beer, a napping cat and a dog nearby. No car alarms or emails, no mowers next door. Only the saxophone and a vague breeze, some crows. A Monday when nothing mattered, even if it did.

Categories: Memoir, microblogging, parenting, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, humor, journal writing, Memoir, pacific northwest, parenting, prose, William Pearse writer