Breathe

Northern Crayfish

I’ve been pretty busy at work. Some of you gleaned this from the fact my name’s been mentioned of late in the local newspaper. In my “real” job, the one that pays the bills, that happens sometimes: I get cases assigned to me that someone at the newspaper thinks are “newsworthy”. But as I move into my 14th year as a judge, I’m feeling the weight of what I do for a living a bit more than I used to. I’ve heard that’s a natural progression. Maybe. But I find myself less and less willing, at the end of a hard day, to tend to things that need doing around the house. It’s driving Rene’, my long-suffering wife of thirty-three years, crazy.

So the other day, I ripped off my suit jacket, slacks, dress shirt, and tie (how I hate wearing a tie!) and slipped on my battered old paint-stained bluejeans and an old T-shirt. It was  sunny and warm outside and the leavings of winter (you know: old dog turds, bits of paper, scraps of wood, gravel from the road; that sort of stuff) needed to be raked into piles. So I walked out to our tool shed, pulled out a rake, and took a swipe at some physical labor. You know what? It felt good. Oh, I paid for it last night when my left shoulder, the one that’s been acting up since Jack and I got T-boned by a young lady on a bright Sunday morning (we were on our way to church: she, unfortunately, was still drunk from Saturday night) throbbed in bed. But being outside, with a rake in my hands, the sun shining bright, and birds flitting over the greening grass of our lawn, well, it was something I needed to do more than something that needed doing. When I was done with the raking, I walked over to stairs that slope down the riverbank to the Cloquet River. Kramer, our frail chocolate Labrador, stood behind me, scanning the flowage, unable, due to age and bad hips, to join me as I sat on a wooden tread of the stairs and watched black water move. Beneath the river’s undulating surface, in about two feet of water, I spotted a crayfish walking, not scuttling, slowly across the pebbled bed of the Cloquet. He or she or it (I’m uncertain as to the sexual nomenclature of crustaceans) didn’t do anything fancy during the fifteen minutes I watched quietly from the stairway. I saw no great episode of life and death. No bass zipped into my field of view to snatch up the shellfish for a quick dinner. No otter plunged to the shallows to pluck the crayfish and motor off. It was just me, and Kramer, and the little crayfish absorbing the sun and taking a breath.

Movement up river broke my meditation. I caught sight of a male wood duck, all alone, no mate in sight, drifting with the slow current. The duck stopped a dozen yards from the dog and me, his colors dazzling in the late afternoon sun, his peeping voice at odds with his ducky bill.

Male Wood Duck

It didn’t take long for the beautifully feathered bird to figure out I was there, gawking at him. He fluttered his short wings and scooted away, hell bent on finding his wife. Once the duck was out of sight, I rose slowly from the stairs, patted Kramer on the head, and ambled towards the house. I filled bird feeders with feed, put away the rake, and then decided, because my attempts to get Jack, our youngest, involved in my chores had failed, to pull out the trampoline and set it up. The rig was a gift to our third son, Chris, who’s now twenty-four, for making the honor roll when he was at Hermantown Middle School. The tramp has served all of our boys, their friends, and assorted nieces and nephews well over the past thirteen summers and is still in good shape. Oh, there’ve been a few broken bones (cousin Alex broke a wrist, I think) and some odd bruises and bumps, but mostly the kids have had a ball jumping and flipping for hours on end. During the hottest days of summer, one of Jack’s favorite things to do is to set up the lawn sprinkler under the tramp and jump through cold well water beneath the glaring sun. Anyway, it took a good hour or so to get the trampoline set up. That was the last of my chores, at least the ones on my list (as opposed to Rene’s list), which meant I had time to sit on a rocking chair on our covered front porch and read the newspaper.

Eastern Bluebird

My work finished, paper in hand, I settled into the rocking chair intent upon focusing on the day’s news. But nature wasn’t quite done with me. My favorite bird, the male eastern bluebird, decided to make an appearance. About ten years ago, we started putting up bluebird houses. And the bluebirds decided, after some discussion in bluebirdeese, I am sure, that they liked what we’d done. So now, every year, pairs (at least two, sometimes three) of eastern bluebirds come back and nest in the little wooden birdhouses on posts next to our vegetable garden. And every year, little bluebirds are hatched, raised, and fledged at the edge of pasture on our place. I watched as the male bird, his bright blue backside most visible during flight, landed on the very tip top of a spruce near Rene’s dormant flower garden. The bird didn’t seem to mind my company. He too seemed content to pause, to take a moment, and breathe.

Peace.

Mark