once a farmer

In my renewed effort to enjoy all my jellybeans, I decided to join the dog when he rang the bell hanging on the backdoor, his "command" for me to open the door for him. He has me trained pretty well, and I'm sure he would agree. It's a beautiful morning, sunny already but not too hot. The dog does what he usually does -- plops down on a sunny patch of grass. I have part of the newspaper with me, so I read for a bit, learning what I can about the new PS4 vs. Xbox debate, and what percentage of people actually eat breakfast everyday.

After a while, the dog is still lying there, and I've run out of reading material. I feel an undeniable desire ... to do some gardening. I hop inside, grab my hat, my gloves, and my clippers. It's time to get to work.

I start with deadheading the roses, which are blooming much better this year since I remembered to prune them before Super Bowl Sunday (a tip a neighbor gave me at the first house we lived in, and I have tried to adhere to, even as the Super Bowl has been moved back into February). I trim back the vining thing with the little white flowers, so pretty to look at but an annoyance in the current layout. I will need to stay on this task throughout the summer, or it will get too friendly with the fig tree, pulling it into its grasp and strangling its limbs.

The dog is now rolling around, thrashing his head about and growling at some phantom playmate until he stops, breathing heavily, and continues what he was doing before: lying on the grass. I turn back to the yardwork, and I remember a discussion with my sister when we talked about our mutual love of gardening, and I can hear her saying, "I think our ancestors must have been farmers. I'll be pulling weeds out of muddy ground, and I always think about rice farmers, and how we probably had ancestors who did that." I think she's right. Or, perhaps, it's just being raised by parents who spent their childhoods in Japan, where nature and gardening are just treated with a different level of respect than it is in our American culture. We spent hours as kids pulling weeds and messing around with bugs, and I actually thought it was fun. Our garden always looked great, thanks to my parents and a couple of uncles who knew bonsaiand would help my dad trim our shrubs to perfection.

I also remember one day, pulling weeds with my husband and telling him what my sister said about our family coming from farmers. Without missing a beat, he stood there wearing a pair of my dad's old gardening gloves, both of us covered in a thin film of grime from being outside all day, and replied: "Yeah. I think my ancestors must have been merchants."Can I get a rimshot? Hey, diggy diggy ... the guy definitely knows how to make me laugh. And, I think he's right. Some of us are born to be close to the earth, and some of us would rather go make some money and pay somebody to do that. Luckily, I like being out here, and I have a dog who will remind me to come outside and tend to the roses.

counting backwards

"What's up with the buttons?" Theresa blurts out at the deli ladies.
The deli ladies look like they are going to freak out. "Oh my god, the buttons! My mom collected buttons. The only thing I kept of hers is this box of buttons."
Clearly, Theresa had been sent to the deli to communicate these messages from the afterlife to the deli ladies, and the Long Island Medium has another successful segment for her show.

I am mesmerized. Although it's basically about dead people, this is a really happy show. This Theresa woman gets to deliver good messages to random people from beyond. A box of buttons, a stuffed shark hanging over a boy's bed, a pocket watch hidden in a sofa, a catch phrase, a nickname that nobody else knew about -- all of these things serve as her certificate of authenticity in a given situation. Tears of joy outnumber tears of sadness on this show.

As I watch episode after episode, unable to turn away and unaware that this was going to turn into some kind of marathon, I start thinking about my own mortality, counting backwards from the age I think I am likely to live until (based on family history) and calculate how old my children will be at that time. Not happy with that result, I start thinking about how old I will be when my children are my age, and am a tiny bit appalled at the answer.

To see my kids live up to my current age, I will have to live for a good 35 more years, and hopefully, go beyond that in an able-bodied manner that allows me to be useful to my kids or my grandchildren, experiencing the beauty of grandmotherhood without becoming a burden. Or, at least, not too much of a burden. That's a lot of years. By that time, my husband will be in his nineties. He has a good chance of reaching that ripe old age, thought, since he's got better long-life genes in his family than I do.

I remember my late father-in-law, then the spitting image of an active, healthy senior, sitting at our kitchen table, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored. He was getting ready to drive into the City to talk to some folks at a senior center -- not for himself, but to see how they ran things, so he could apply these ideas back in Seattle -- and saying to me with a tone of disgust, "Ninety. My life expectancy is ninety! Now, they tell me I have to find something to keep me busy until I'm NINETY." He made it sound dreadful. Trying to make polite conversation, I offered something lame, like, "Well, you can golf ..." to which I'm sure he just shot me a look of disgust. He was tired of having to stay "busy" and challenge himself everyday, but that was what he would do, as long as he had anything to say about it. For him, relaxation was overrated.

One of my friends told me that when he turned fifty, he started counting how many days he had left in his projected life. This, he told me, was a natural thing to do, especially for men -- looking back on his life, and trying to project his future. Calculating that he would live to be eighty, he would have had 10,957 days left. It sounds like a lot, and it probably feels like a lot, too. Maybe it even feels like so many days that you would view it with dread. But if you start counting backwards everyday, suddenly the end is closer than it was yesterday, and one's time on earth feels much more finite.

It's easy to see only the mundane in our lives, when each day just feels like a laundry list of things to do, including doing laundry. I have the fleeting thought that perhaps I would value each day more if I had a way of reminding myself that our time on earth is limited. Maybe I would eat better. No, I mean really eat better. And watch my weight. And get organized, because how will anybody know where anything is when I'm gone?

 What if I got a giant jar of 10,957 jellybeans and took one out each day, watching the jar become more and more empty as the years passed? Maybe that would help ... but I know I'll never do this. First of all, counting out all those jellybeans would take a long time, not to mention the difficulty of finding a jar big enough to hold them all. Also, I'm too superstitious to do this. What if I was meant to put 16,000 jellybeans in, and shortchanged myself by 5,043 days? What if I miscounted? What if somebody else ate the jellybeans while I wasn't looking and depleted the jar prematurely? I know it is silly and illogical to think that I would drop dead on-the-spot when the jar was empty (which I will attribute to having watched one too many Twilight Zone marathons), but why tempt fate? In any case, I will not be embarking on the jellybean jar experiment. Jar or no jar, my days are numbered, and I need to do a better job of valuing each day.