One summer Sunday I was sitting on the riverbank thinking of a story I was writing. A lifetime of scribbled ideas and abandoned projects had begun to take the form of a collection, and I was in a creative fervor.
Suddenly I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. Turning, I saw him standing above me, glaring. He had been laboring for hours, as was his wont. He had mowed the lawn, weeded the garden and painted the porch and for all I knew plowed the back 40. He was fed up with me, sitting there doing nothing. I was ashamed.
It wasn’t until later, after I had swept the house and washed the dishes and cleaned the fridge and we were on our way back to the city, that I realized the story I had been thinking about had faded away. I tried to summon the characters and reimagine the setting, to stoke the urgency I’d felt on the riverbank, but the curtain had dropped; the stage was dark and empty.
I looked at my husband driving, his face set in stern concentration, and saw how pleased he was with what he had accomplished over the weekend. “Listen,” I said, “when you see me sitting there staring off into the distance doing nothing, I’m busy.”
He smiled and squeezed my thigh. After a moment, he said, “I want to clean out the pachysandra around the barn next week.”
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dintr-o poveste reala si cu multe intelesuri publicata astazi in New York Times
