palimpsest

Since the early spring of the year I have often spent long hours in the garage or yard working on a variety of tasks. When I am out of the house like this doing seemingly aimless chores my wife will call out and ask what it is I am doing. My standard response to that question, on days like this, is to reply, “I’m piddling dear.” 

Now, at this point, if you look up the definition of piddling you are apt to consider me a very lazy individual. Britannica says piddling is ‘to waste time doing something that is not important or useful.’ Over time, I have developed my own definition of the word to mean: to go seemingly aimless from one task to another eventually culminating in getting a surprising amount done. Maybe, there is another word that better describes this process, but I like piddling, and I am sticking with it. 

When I consider what I am doing whilst piddling I often wonder if there is any connection to ADD. I think I may have had attention deficit disorder when I was younger. I did not do well in school as I was more often than not very bored. I could get very far ahead of the class in textbook reading assignments only to be told to slow down and stay with the rest of the class.  

Present day, I’ll be cleaning up a flower bed and out of the blue remember the seedlings I had started weeks before. I stop, leaving all my utensils and watering can in place and venture back into the garage to check on said plantings. Noticing a few seedlings have grown enough to be transplanted I will pull out the required accessories and begin the process. 

At some point in the process of moving the small plants into bigger pots I discover I have too many pots and some look rather old and ratty. That instant, I pull all the pots out and sort them on the garage floor, arranging by size. In the end I only manage to place one or two pots in the garbage, after all, I may someday need an old pot or two, it happens. 

Task uncompleted, I begin to wonder what I was working on before I discovered the pots, but wait, wasn’t I going to add on some drip irrigation lines for my blueberry and raspberry plants? The weather is fairly nice, and I am getting tired of using the hose or carrying buckets of water from the rain barrel. In a flash I am carrying tubing cutters and everything else I will need out into the yard to solve my problem.  

As I finish burying the lines and hooking up the splitters, and connectors, out of the corner of my eye I see a group of weeds in one of my nine four by four foot raised beds. Leaving all the tools used for the irrigation project I don my garden gloves and make way to harvest some mangy weeds. This must be done now to avoid having any effect on my vegetables. In the middle of this dirty process, I notice several tomato plants appear to have had explosive growth and are now displaying long vines that are falling to the ground.  

I head back into the garage to grab stakes and string in order to provide support only to see my seedlings and pots right where I had left them. Well, they will be there when I finish staking the tomatoes. Oh, and over there are all of the pots spread out waiting for me to finish organizing them so they all fit on the shelf where I got them from. It can wait, since they are certainly going to be noticed when I need to pull my car back into the garage before I go in for the day. Why did I pull the car out? 

That’s right, I pulled the car out of the garage so I could get to my wheelbarrow to mix up the soil I need for that last four by four bed. This needs to get done before the hot weather sets in when it will be too stressful for the vegetable seedlings I still need to plant. As I am mixing up the dirt for the bed my wife opens the back door from the house to the garage. She looks around at the mess and asks, “What are you doing out here,” to which I respond, “just piddling around dear.” With that said she goes back inside to leave me to my piddle. 

People need to piddle more. Everyone is so focused and intensely dedicated to getting things done. We must be adding a new deck or completely reseeding the yard. There must be a new patio or remodeling the kitchen. Keeping up with the Jones’ is robbing everyone of time well wasted, to coin an Eagles title. Many seem to think that not having a specific goal in mind is so very wrong. Often, when we appear to be wasting time, we accomplish a lot. 

By the end of the day everything I had started is completed and the car is back in the garage.  All the stray tools have been collected, I hope, and I have swept up any dirt that is on the garage floor. I went aimlessly from one task to another, but in the end, I got a lot done and as I walk inside to dinner, I am feeling satisfied. Some would say I have ADD, but I do not like that tag. It is so clinical, cold, and unrevealing. I will hang onto piddling; it has character and while not very revealing it sounds so much better.