do nothing days

“Grandma, do you ever have days when you have nothing to do?” Avery asked me one day this past spring.

My answer was, “I have days when I do nothing, but I always have something I could do.”  

Jay bopped in one day after school and asked, “How can you stand it just being here all day long?”

I laughed and assured him I was fine being at my house all day and not going anywhere.

A  phone call from Avery often starts out with, “Grandma what are you doing today?”  

After I tell her what I am doing she decides whether it is more exciting  here than what is going on at her house.  Hint:  “Can I come down?”  Coming to our house is down….we go up the hill to her house.  Unless I am about to leave to go someplace, I can usually expect my nine year old granddaughter at my door within five minutes after we hang up.

In order to help me find something to do, Carter said to me after Jay’s comment about how bored I must be just staying home, “Grandma you should write a book.”

“What would I write about?” I asked him.

“You could write about your life after I got here.” Carter is seven.

“I could write about my life before you got here.  That is a longer period of time,”  I said.

“You could write about where you have visited.”

“Yes,” I said.  “I’ve gone a lot of places.

Even though my grandchildren may worry that I don’t have enough to do to keep myself from getting bored, a very used word in their vocabulary,  I explain that I am never bored.  The art of doing nothing is really deciding to spend some time doing whatever comes to mind.

For me that often is reading a good book or magazine, making popcorn, writing, walking to the spring, taking photos, finding the dog so I can pet her, going through old letters and pictures, messing in my craft room, sending a note to a friend or taking a nap.

In my working years I had little time for do nothing days.  My to do list was always a mile long.  In the summer, after our family’s ten day getaway,  I started in the attics and spring cleaned all the way to the basement.  There was nothing I left undone.  Besides that I sewed clothes for my daughter and me for the next school year, canned what we liked for the winter and just never seemed to have a spare moment.  Perhaps that is why do nothing days now seem earned and a reward for hard work in the past.

However doing nothing one night scared my children.  We had finished a family dinner on a summer evening.  I was tired after cleaning up in the kitchen.  The grandchildren were out playing by the creek and I went out to find them.  Walking into our big yard, I decided to lie down on my back and just look at the sky.

One of my children happened to look out the window and shouted, “Mom’s down!”  As my daughter came running across the lawn, my daughter-in-law called 911.  Before she had a chance to say anything I sat up.

She hung up and the 911 operator called her back.  I think she was embarrassed when she had to tell the operator she thought something had happened to me, but I was really O.K.  The whole incident, while laughable to me, showed that my family was ready to act quickly on my behalf.

Doing nothing is never a boring concept as I experienced just looking at the clouds that summer evening.   In many ways it is like the summer days of my childhood. Summers seemed endless as a child and by August I was asking my mother when school started again. Now summers fly by and I cherish a few days here and there when I choose to just do nothing.

“To lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”   -John Lubbock