What I Did Today, by Courtney Schroeder

Today I did what is conventionally called nothing. I walked down the road, picking wild blackberries with my mouth for a bowl. When I'd had my fill, I came home, stripped off my clothes, and lay in the sunshine. Doing nothing set  an example for the children and they were off all day, in the hammock and their rooms, and I could hear their pleasant murmurings while I tried to do something, anything, but instead I got a sunburn. We have lived here just over a month and every day I wake shocked to be living in a dream. It is cool in the mornings and I pull a sweater over me, make porridge, lick syrup from the spoon.   By afternoon, we can walk to the river if we want, or drive down our mountain into the ocean, or almost; from here we can do anything we want. When we run out of money pretty soon, I'll have to do what people call something, which usually means get a job I don't like but I won't have to do that because I"ll like it, because I'll be full of blackberries and sunshine by then. The girls will be in school and, by some tangled grace, I'll have time to write poems in the mornings by the kitchen window,  with my tea.  Frankly, my life is a poem today, all the time, because that's what  doing nothing means--it means filling your mouth with sweetness until there is no way to get the words out.  The poem is  the thing that happens just before or just after the writing--it is loneliness and happiness at once which is what I've been waiting for all my life so now, when the dark rustles in, and the girls finally admit sleep,  I refuse to do anything except welcome loneliness--and why not?  I scrape supper scraps into the compost, rinse dishes, sponge the table off. There is no other poem, no other life than this, and after all,  I could kiss loneliness and if you were here  or close by--but nobody is--you would hear  loneliness and I laughing and clapping  one another on the back for another job well done, and you might not believe it but it would be true.