In my youth I resented the piddling spring and summer chores my father would request of me. Mowing the lawn, painting a fence, raking leaves, doing away with wasps. We lived in the city most of the time I was able to do much of anything, and so there wasn’t much of anything to do, but still I would have rather been playing video games or watching cartoons. 

Now, so much of what I adore about living in the country is the opportunity to have more chores. That’s not quite what’s so grand about it, but it’s not far from the truth of the matter. 

Spring’s the best time for that. Summer’s hot and you’ve been a little burned by the flurry of the first months, but in spring you’re fresh and the ground’s just soft enough to work with, but too soft for hauling stones. 

This weekend we made raised beds and put in the chicken door. It’s a silly thing, there’s no rhyme or reason to the supports, but there needn’t be, it’s a cute thing for keeping chickens from pooping in my barn. That way I can use it as a shop, thay way my old shop is empty, that way I can turn it into an apartment, a thing I’ve got to do by June, which is just four weeks away because that’s when two people intend to make a home in there. 

I’ve got to put in a floor, put up drywall, install some stairs, a wood stove, a sink, a stove, a fridge, a counter, and open shelves, then I’ll have to replace some windows and replace a sliding door. Plus I’ve got to paint the place. 

It’ll be a long month, or a short one. The steps were something I’m wary of, the angles aren’t right and it’s a close space with strange ups and down, it’s looking less like stairs in my mind and more like a ladder with extra steps. That’s making me less anxious really, a ladder’s something I understand, stairs are not. 

Wish me luck. 

May spring last forever. 

accelerated or slowed, but the very axis of time, the point of beginning was adjusted.

I hadn’t yet realized it, but up until that moment the film was in the projector, but it was just floppin’ around, spinning into and from nowhere, it had only just caught, right then, that was the beginning. 

I felt tired today. I built some raised beds for the garden, I put in a post for the door to the chicken yard, I cleaned. It occurred to me that maybe I feel more tired than I use to. That back when I was doing yard work last summer, maybe I was less spent because Roby wasn’t around. I speculated that that might have been true but in truth, I had no idea. 

It’s not so much that I couldn’t remember, as the feeling eluded me. Feeling and memory often come hadn in hand and while I could understand how much I got done I could not remember how tired I felt. 

That might be humanity’s super power. We can’t feel into or out of things very well, at least not in a way that casts our current circumstances in a bad light. It’s why women can go through child birth multiple times, they forget. 

Rationally they know what it was like, but they can forget the feeling of it. I forget the feeling of not being Roby’s dad. In the same way that she has no access to a universe where I’m not her dad, I’m blind to such a place.

And thank goodness.