Saturday morning from the (not so) rough

Saturday From the (Not So) Rough

Last Saturday morning, Jan and I went and picked nine fucking pounds of blueberries.

Nine pounds.

Apparently at 55 years old this is what qualifies as a wild Saturday morning now.

And you know what?

I fucking loved it.

There was something about standing out there picking berries with my wife that felt ridiculously simple. No deadlines. No emails. No book. No trying to figure out what the hell comes next.

Just me, Jan, and enough blueberries to survive a small New Hampshire winter.

Then Monday showed up.

And this week proceeded to kick my ass.

Work was work.

You know the kind of week where you answer one email and three more crawl out from underneath it. Where you spend half your day solving problems you didn’t create and the other half wondering how grown adults have survived this long without supervision.

And then there was the book.

That goddamn book.

For months I’ve been getting up before the sun, pouring coffee, sitting down, and going back through pieces of my life I spent years trying not to think about.

Some mornings it was writing.

Some mornings it was editing.

Some mornings it was just staring at a paragraph thinking:

Well, fuck. We’re really gonna talk about this, huh?

This week, the book kicked my ass.

There were moments I loved it.

Moments I hated it.

Moments I thought it might actually be pretty damn good.

And moments I wondered if I’d lost my mind thinking anybody would ever want to read it.

But Thursday, I finished the first full editing pass.

Thirty-five chapters.

My life sitting there in one document.

It isn’t ready yet.

There’s cutting to do. Repetition to clean up. Places where I said the same damn thing three different ways because apparently trauma is repetitive and so am I.

But the story is there.

And for the first time, I can see the whole damn thing.

That’s a strange feeling.

Because writing something like this isn’t just telling stories.

Sometimes you’re reopening doors you’ve spent decades trying to nail shut.

And by the end of this week, I was tired.

Not “I need a nap” tired.

Soul tired.

So Friday, I did something considerably less emotionally complicated.

I went golfing with some coworkers.

And somewhere between the first tee, a few terrible shots, some decent ones, laughing at ourselves, and trying once again to convince a little white ball to go in the general direction I intended…

I remembered something.

This is the life I was trying to get to.

Not some perfect life.

Not one where everything gets healed and tied up with a pretty little bow.

This one.

Picking blueberries with my wife.

Getting aggravated at work.

Writing something that scares the shit out of me.

Playing golf badly with good people.

Coming home tired.

Laughing.

Being here.

That’s the strange thing about spending months writing about survival.

Eventually you look up from the page and realize you’re not surviving anymore.

You’re just living.

And maybe that’s why those nine pounds of blueberries mattered more than I realized.

Life doesn’t always announce the good parts.

Sometimes they’re just sitting there on a bush waiting for you to notice them.

Anyway…

We have approximately 47,000 blueberries in the freezer.

The book is written.

The golf game remains under investigation.

And this morning the coffee tastes pretty damn good.

After that, I’ll be cutting the grass—which has not been cut since before my birthday.

So if anybody wakes up this morning thinking, Man, I wish I had something miserable to do today, come on over.

I’ve got several acres of poor decisions waiting on you.

Happy Saturday, y’all.

Keep swinging.

Even when you’re in the rough.