"Work Ethic"

       Many years ago, I attended a birthday party where for entertainment a woman read our fortunes. I stood in fascination as she described the lives and futures of various friends and family members. I could barely wait for my turn.
            The woman did her card shuffle and looked at me with a sad smile. “You work,” she said softly.
           “Yes,” I responded and waited for her to reveal some future travels or adventures as she had for everyone else.
            She shook her head and glanced down at her cards again. “No. That’s all I see. You work. You work all the time. There’s nothing else that I see.”
            Tears blinded my eyes as I moved off to the side for her to take the next person in line. I rounded up my husband, son, and his friend and told them I wanted to leave. I couldn’t get into the car fast enough. Sobs shook me the second I closed the car’s door.
            “What’s wrong?” my husband asked.
           “You heard what that woman said,” my words drowned by tears. “She saw nothing but work.”
            That casual observation by a party entertainer punched me in the gut because it resounded with truth.
            At that time, I taught high school English. I slipped into my classroom an hour early every morning and stayed almost as long most days. My evenings and weekends involved chipping away at an endless mountain of essays, journals, and projects that never dwindled no matter how many hours I graded. With the time that remained to my day, I did house and yard work. Rarely did I do anything just for pleasure.
            Amazement filled me if I heard about friends taking off for evenings or weekends with “the girls.” How did they find the time? How could they simply leave their jobs and households for a few days at the beach? Guilt over spending that much money and time on myself would make the intended respite stressful for me. In my mind, I’d fret over all the stuff I wasn’t getting done.
            Over the years, I don’t think I’ve learned how to play without donning a layer of guilt like a second skin. For the last two days, I’ve had no substitute jobs because the openings have been at high schools, middle schools, or schools that are too far from my home. This year, I limited myself to only doing elementary schools within a ten minute drive from my house. I grab jobs at the high school campus that’s walking distance from my house, too. Yesterday, when nothing opened up, I convinced myself that the budget hit wasn’t too bad. I changed out of my work clothes and found my rattiest t-shirt and oldest pair of shorts. I headed out to the back yard and did three hours of yard work. In other words, I worked.
            With today off, it means a harder hit to my extra income. I almost talked myself into taking a slot at a middle school where I could possibly have a totally rotten day. I battled back and forth on the importance of the $78.65 I’ll net VS the Middle School Madness of students in May. I decided to stay home for a second day, but feel guilty about not taking that slot.
             As I sit at keyboard, my mind drifts to the hedges out front. My work ethic primly points out, “You should use today to trim those bushes.”
            Another voice, distant and faint, echoes in my memory. “You work. You work.”
            Maybe today I’ll step away from my overdeveloped sense of responsibility and enjoy an unexpected and unplanned day off—and do nothing at all.

Watching acorns grow!

Copyright 2019 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman  

             
           

"Deer in the Headlight"

            Defiantly, her eyes locked with mine. Not a ripple of concern in her stance or glance as she faced me while my heart shifted to a faster syncopation. My headlights mirrored from her pupils for a second before she dismissed me. Casually, she crossed the road with the confidence that no harm would befall her.

            My foot, stamped to the brake, eased off to crawl my car forward. The predawn shadows complicated my search of the path from which the doe had unexpectedly emerged. No fawns follower her, and I cruised up to 20 MPH.

            As I rounded the corner, our small neighborhood herd waited in edgy anticipation by its morning feeding spot. Daily, an elderly retired man dumped buckets of dried corn from the back of his pickup truck. In long ago conversation, he’d told me that he needed to know someone counted on him being somewhere each day. With his wife’s death, his retirement had turned to unexpected loneliness that he filled by caring for these deer. This morning five deer awaited his arrival.

            My thoughts drifted from the doe to an old man’s loneliness as I edged onward into my day.

Copyright 2019 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman

"Wants VS Needs"

 

         I’ve read some pretty mean comments on social media recently. Insulting words lashing out, sometimes with no obvious reason for the inflammatory temper tantrums. Suddenly, a conversational steam turns ugly. I sit dumbfounded as I read through cruel, malicious responses from people I thought to be reasonable—and nice.

         Most of the time, I try to understand both sides of the issue. If I weigh in (many times I bite my tongue and keep away from my keyboard), I attempt to find factual support for the issue at hand. Sometimes I balance myself onto a middle ground. Occasionally, I respond with well thought out deliberation. Fortunately, I have a blog wherein I can pull together longer reflections.

         In my dream-state last night, I mulled through this-n-that in an effort to distill recent events into some kind of cohesive theory that applies to a bigger picture, and I tossed-n-turned myself into a dichotomy of wants versus needs.

         Many people state belief systems as though they are needs. They need to follow their religious doctrines.  They need to spank their children—and everyone else’s, too. They need to defund programs like education and welfare. They need to take care of their own—even if that means making decisions that harm others. They need to own guns. They need to stop abortion. They need to segregate themselves way from minorities. They need to prepare for Armageddon.

          Whenever these people speak out, they truly feel that these things are essential requirements for their safety and happiness—for their duty to family, or church, or country. Their insistence that things are needs lends a level of urgency and unreasonable panic to their daily lives. When they feel that these needs are threatened, they respond with illogical anger and boiling hostility. They view their world as always threatened by someone else encroaching upon or diminishing their basic needs and rights. It must be rough living with so much distress and disharmony.

         I wish I could wave a magic wand over these people and shift their mindset to the fact that all of these things are wants, and not needs, because the urgency and fear shifts dramatically with this worldview.

Copyright 2018 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman

“Incredible Inflatables

            For older neighborhoods like ours, finding space for anything proves problematic. Our house, built in the mid-1960s, originally paced out as a 1,000 square foot three bed, one bath, and a one car garage home. Typical for the time period, the builder designed about seven different floorplans with some including one more bedroom, bathroom and a luxurious two car garage. To optimize our cottage, we converted our garage into half storage on the garage door end and a permanent wall that gave us another room originally used for an office. Nice bi-fold doors separated the laundry and pantry from the office. Many of our neighbors have done a similar change, and some have sacrificed their garage completely.

            Since our backyards stretch to comfortable sizes, outdoor storage sheds, ranging from utilitarian to She Sheds, grew throughout the area. We opted to go with an addition to the back and planted a hot tub and gardens instead of a shed. Eventually, we relied upon renting additional storage, especially once Mom moved into our home.

            Our purge through storage units, both attics, and our half-garage area ate up years of “Keep, Give Away, Toss” until last year found me tackling the garage once more time and replacing old containers with neat, matching, reinforced bins. Everything now has its own place, but there’s absolutely no room for more unless I enforce my rule “One thing in, a like thing out.”

I’ve turned away from adding outside, holiday decorations because they are often wooden or metal and always bulky.

            Until a last year when the cost of inflatable decorations dropped onto shelves in At Home, Home Depot, and Walmart! One sturdy, stackable bin can hold several Halloween decorations, a Thanksgiving turkey, and a Christmas snowman and Christmas cactus! Within the box we have two projectors and all of the necessary extension cords, too.  And there’s room for more! We hope to add to the collection with uniquely incredible holiday choices each year.

Copyright 2024 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman 

"Changing Leaves"

          Running around the past few days on Christmas shopping errands, awe stopped me in my tracks. Our Red Oak and our neighbor’s Arizona Ash decided to don bright, contrasting reds and yellows. My husband’s iPhone and my old trusty Canon captured this brilliant moment.

            Enjoy!

Copyright 2024 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman