There is a sticky film covering just about everything outside our house this summer. Run your hand along the metal railing of our front steps, and you’ll immediately wish you hadn’t. Lean up against one of the vehicles and you’ll feel the stickiness on your elbows. Every morning when you climb behind the wheel you see your windshield was coated again overnight. The willow leaves are shiny.
The reason for the stickiness is a little beetle infesting the birch trees. It’s called a Birch Miner and it looks like a black ladybug. Some years we have yellow jacket infestations, some years mosquitoes in greater-than-normal numbers. This year, the black ladybugs are the nuisance pest.
This past Saturday I decided it was time to wash their secretion off the vehicles. It was a beautiful day — a little hot out, by my standards — but sunny, with no rain in sight. I told my wife I was going to knock the car washes out, and maybe start playing with that bag of concrete I bought a while back. She asked if washing cars and working with concrete was restful, by which she meant to imply that toiling in the hot sun with concrete on my day-off might constitute a day of hard labor, rather than a sabbath activity. She’s right, but for me it was nothing.
The reason she asked was because we try to take things easy on our sabbaths. We take a day each week to rest; we spend time doing nothing. But rest has a very different meaning for my wife than it does for me.
She spent a good part of Saturday reading about neuropsychology and setting up our daughter’s Instagram business account. I spent Saturday washing the sticky off both vehicles, experimenting in the kitchen with making blueberry muffin tops, and converting units of measure to figure out how much water to mix with a small buckets worth of the 80lbs of concrete.
We were both happy, doing nothing.
All of this may seem like something. For us, these were endeavors that don’t need to be undertaken, can just as easily be ditched if we get bored with them, won’t bring in any income, and might be total fails. Nothing. Or in other words, nothing important.
Speaking of nothing, I know nothing about concrete. The first time I’d ever touched a bag of concrete was when I bought that one…a year ago. Those suckers are heavy, which is probably why it took me so long to think about it again. But summer is waning and our steps need resurfaced sometime before the rainy season, which is probably just around the corner. It doesn’t need to be done right away, but it might be fun.
The instructions on the bag said to mix it with water, then apply. That’s it. I’m a little skeptical because a friend who’s built a few houses said I need to mix it with sand till I get the right composition to balance strength and appeal. That makes sense but it’s not what the bag says.
A quandary. Now I’m having fun. This is now a science experiment.
I decided to mix a little based on the instructions, and try it out on something small. I shared my plan with my wife, and off to Pinterest she went to search out fun ideas for things one can do with small quantities of concrete. We came up with a few projects till she grew weary of Pinterest, tossed her phone aside, and picked up a book — something about Mrs. Pollifax, a senior-citizen-turned-CIA-operative, if I heard her right. In her estimation, my Nothing had lost its appeal .
But I never got to the concrete. I wanted to, but after moving the bag to the backyard shed, my son approached and asked if I wanted to have a NERF battle.
“Sure,” I said. That sounded like a way better Nothing.
We spent the next hour in pitched combat with and against his sisters and toddler brother in two games of capture-the-flag. The baby in my backpack bounced around as I ran up and down the property, only knocked over the toddler once, and had to reinforce the rule that nobody hides behind mom as she sits on the deck reading. It was a Nothing kind of a day and we took full advantage.
I started that Saturday by waking up early to have coffee with a friend. This is the last thing my wife would ever want to do — not the coffee with friends part (she’d do that all day, every day if she could), but the waking up early when you don’t have to part. I loathe getting up early as well, but the time worked for my friend and it was worth getting up for.
Later that day I played a computer game with the kids called Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes. After failing to defuse several virtual bombs my wife mentioned she loves when we play it. The game requires a lot of teamwork and technical problem solving. It’s complex, stressful, terribly frustrating, and we normally lose. We love it. It was the perfect way to end a day full of Nothing.
And we needed that day of Nothing, because Sunday was full of events that had required a week of logistical planning to pull off. My introvert wife was extroverting from morning till late afternoon while I shuttled kids around and tried to help her out with tech challenges during our brief meet-ups throughout the day. When she finally stumbled in the door, we both fell onto the sofa, exhausted from all the things.
“Want some coffee?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, with closed eyes.
“Want to get in your Nothing box?”
“Yes!” she said. And now she was smiling again.