I don't want to miss this

Landscape with Gate at Sunset by Hugh Huntington Howard

It’s a Monday night. My yard needs mowing.

Since the fall of our kind with the apple incident in the Garden, man has felt the inner ache, the loss of his domain. So we’ve tried and tried to replace it with empires, kingdoms, and in my suburban life here in the Highland Acres subdivision: my yard.

The goosegrass and the dandelions dance and play in the wind, whipping their long stalks with smiles on their faces. They’re taunting my wife and child: “Your father is a lazy bum!”

Thursday, my 6-months pregnant wife crashed from nesting, painting (she’s an artist), going to Target, meal prepping and caring for a 1-year-old. She insists that she’s being a lazy bum but read the sentence before and you’ll see why my wife has a productivity devil on her shoulder that will not shut up.

So being someone who is trying not to be a lazy bum, I gave her the night off and fed my daughter a peanut butter sandwich, played with her (which consisted of a game where she sat on my head), and changed a diaper that had the most poop in it in recorded history. There was so much bodily detritus that when I pressed the offending diaper through the flap of the diaper genie, I pulled my hand up to find ... let’s just say leftovers. I screamed out loud. Thankfully, Emily was blissfully in the shower and heard none of this. I read to my daughter, ironically enough, Pooh stories and she went to sleep.

Friday I was prepared to mow when East Tennessee weather played its favorite game for the month of August: unleashing a violent thunderstorm precisely at 6:30 p.m. which has been the ruin of many a high school football game.

Saturday was the sabbath. The day when God commands me to be a lazy bum.

Sunday got away from me, and then at 6:30 p.m. it stormed.

Monday, I fired up my mower, weed-eater and leaf blower, put on a murder mystery audio book (“She did it, she’s way too happy to talk to the detective”) and I got the job done.

It’s late summer. By 8:20, the sun is losing its fight as indigo clouds peel apart to orange sky. In the east, a passing storm to the south burns bright orange. I like sunsets, I love looking away from the sun and seeing all the light falls on.

I turned off my audio book just as the detective interrogated the victim’s lousy boyfriend. I dropped the phone and headphones onto the patio furniture and I set down the weed-eater. The back patio needed edging, but something in me didn’t want to miss this moment.

There’s so much to be done, to think about, to try to be. But the thing I want to be, to have, to know is never in the present. It’s always ahead of me. It’s not out of my grasp because convincing myself I can get if it if I just … is what gives me the chemical boost to start scheming up some new plan that will finally work. Then I’ll do it, make it, be it: what I feel in the depth of my bones that I should be, whatever that is.

I sat down and looked at the orange carvings of the sky behind the feathery clouds.

“I don’t want to miss this moment,” I breathed in prayer.

The inner ache remained. But I know it won’t last.

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I really wanted this piece to end there, but I felt something on my head and pulled a spider off. In a bit of a panic, I went inside and asked my wife to check for bites.

She didn’t find any. Spider was just along for the ride … lazy bum.