To Do

My husband is out of town for the week, and I make a list of things to do. I want to be productive while he’s gone. Grow something, is one of the things on the list. Cook something. Throw something out. I check the items off dutifully. Pick the tomatoes that are finally ripening in the garden and turn them into a spaghetti sauce. Pull out the spent cucumber vine. (That counts as throwing out, I decide.) 

I add more things to do. Paint the kitchen trim and finish reading the book I’m reading for my book club. Write every day for at least one hour. Clean the house. I am a Crossing-Items-Off-My-List machine, powering through the week like an Olympian sprinting across the finish line, arms raised and barely out of breath. 

What else can I grow, clean, cook, paint, read, write? Wait, am I running from something? The quiet house, my strange, random thoughts in the middle of the night, the dog draped over my feet. One night the power flickers. The fan clicks on, the doorbell rings (this is a thing with our doorbell, the ding-dong after a power outage. It’s funny during the day, but a little scary at three o’clock in the morning.) 

The dog sleeps through it, but I stay up for a while, wide awake and squinting at the ceiling, relieved that I am no longer afraid of the dark. The old me would’ve tripped down the stairs to check the front door, done a frantic whirl around the house to test all of the locks. It is a gift to lie in bed alone and know that you are safe. 

End of the week and there are more things to do. (There are always more things to do.) Instead, I spend hours writing this post. Mostly, I am staring out the window at the squirrels running across the powerlines, how the sky darkens, and one white moth flutters over the yellow flowers along the fence. 

The other day when I was out there pulling weeds, I lifted a stone and found a dead toad, its body shriveled up and stiff, but before I dropped the stone back over it, a fluid-like substance squirted out of its rear end, and as I watched, the body inflated and the toad came back to life. I am not lying. It blinked at me and hopped away. 

I immediately looked this up online and learned that some toads go into a kind of hibernation during droughts to conserve energy. Cool. But now, I'm worried that I’ve interrupted this process and must add another item to my list: Leave water for the freshly rehydrated toad. 

This morning, I set a dish out. A gift for the toad, a gift for me. We have done enough for today.