Certain efforts
I’m rereading my dissertation so as to turn parts of it into an article. What effort I expended on it last year, and the year before!
The passages in which I pinpoint how, exactly, I disagree with my forebears are especially complicated. They read as if I were negotiating a maze of narrow hallways under a four-foot-high ceiling.
I’m carrying a heavy shovel loaded with dead grass. I’m trying not to spill a single blade.
I’m exhausted and confused.
Still, I can just about trace the right path.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The image of the shovel comes easily. This week, I’ve been using a shovel to move severed grass up from the large back lawn into a tall trash bin. The chore has been draining.
I thought it would take a single day to do. In fact, it has taken three. Karin helped on the last day.
If the chore hadn’t been completed, dead grass would have piled up tonight at every turn of the mower, as it has been doing the last three weeks.
Tonight, I wouldn’t have been able to finish trimming the back lawn.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Well, as it happened, rain kept me from finishing, anyway; I left a half-hour’s mowing undone. Such was the hazard of waiting for Karin to return from work so that she could look after Samuel.
The rain will cause the still uncut grass to grow longer. After the grass is cut, it’ll block the mower during the lawn’s next trimming.
To ruminate is to chew and rechew the cud. I was well acquainted with that metaphor’s application to philosophy.
Now, the expression is showing a disconcerting tendency toward literalness.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Little Samuel has been paying closer attention to his books. Last night, he listened respectfully while Karin read to him about the “Little Blue Truck.” Then, a certain line –
CLUCK said the chicken, and the chick said PEEP!
– struck him as hilarious, and he laughed and laughed.
It’s good that our boy has a robust sense of humor, even if it’s rather unpredictable.
The passages in which I pinpoint how, exactly, I disagree with my forebears are especially complicated. They read as if I were negotiating a maze of narrow hallways under a four-foot-high ceiling.
I’m carrying a heavy shovel loaded with dead grass. I’m trying not to spill a single blade.
I’m exhausted and confused.
Still, I can just about trace the right path.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The image of the shovel comes easily. This week, I’ve been using a shovel to move severed grass up from the large back lawn into a tall trash bin. The chore has been draining.
I thought it would take a single day to do. In fact, it has taken three. Karin helped on the last day.
If the chore hadn’t been completed, dead grass would have piled up tonight at every turn of the mower, as it has been doing the last three weeks.
Tonight, I wouldn’t have been able to finish trimming the back lawn.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Well, as it happened, rain kept me from finishing, anyway; I left a half-hour’s mowing undone. Such was the hazard of waiting for Karin to return from work so that she could look after Samuel.
The rain will cause the still uncut grass to grow longer. After the grass is cut, it’ll block the mower during the lawn’s next trimming.
To ruminate is to chew and rechew the cud. I was well acquainted with that metaphor’s application to philosophy.
Now, the expression is showing a disconcerting tendency toward literalness.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Little Samuel has been paying closer attention to his books. Last night, he listened respectfully while Karin read to him about the “Little Blue Truck.” Then, a certain line –
CLUCK said the chicken, and the chick said PEEP!
– struck him as hilarious, and he laughed and laughed.
It’s good that our boy has a robust sense of humor, even if it’s rather unpredictable.