The living is easy

Summertime and the livin' is easy....

Is yours? Are you living easy?  For me, living easy comes in stops and starts.  As I write this, it's an overcast Saturday  morning with rain on the air.  I've got a cup of Starbuck's Tribute coffee at my side and I'm the only one awake.  The birds are in full song and the bumble bees and butterflies are exploring our latest plants and flowers.  I'm sitting on my back porch in my bathrobe, the neighbors haven't yet kicked their radios up to full blast and my only company is Donny.  He's saying very little, having many chipmunks and squirrels to keep in check.

So right now?  Yes, summertime and the living is easy.  Yesterday's summertime was hard but good, working in the yard but not working in an office.  Later today the landscaping will continue and the easy living will recede for a while. 

When Daboyz were little, I was a stay at home mom.  Summertime flowed at its own pace, slow and lazy.  We awoke when we were done sleeping, we got dressed when we felt like it.  Some days we spread a blanket in the backyard and had a picnic.  Other days we walked to see my parents or headed here, where my grandparents lived at the time.  Structure and schedules were other people's worries.  We even drank from the garden hose.

Life wasn't easy then, but the living was.  The exquisite slowness of those warm sunny days were bought with an empty bank account, and worth every cent not in our pockets.  I never felt sad about the money, I felt blessed that the living was easy.

Now, most mornings find me rushed off of the back porch after one cup of coffee, and that not sipped in leisure.  There's a schedule to maintain, a job to get to.  I actually set my alarm a half hour earlier to buy myself more time on the back porch before the world presses in.  Life is easier, the living isn't.  With little boys grown up and changing priorities, I'm wistful about the loss of those slow lazy summer days.  I sigh as I put my coffee cup into the sink and put on my scrubs.  But when I am driving down the freeway with the morning sun overhead, I am well stocked with memories of easy living summer days...not a single one wasted.  There aren't a lot of specific moments, it's the way of it that remains sweetly clear in my mind.  Specific moments don't stand out because it was the way we lived, under the warm sun watching ladybugs climb blades of grass. 

Now we are older and daboyz are in their twenties, working full time jobs.   Still, there are days when the living is easy again.  When I hear one of my sons calling his brother to coordinate their schedules so that they can be here together for dinner, when they gravitate outside with a glass of lemonade and talk about gardens and when they drag the hammock out of the garage and lay under the trees.  I can almost see the shadows of toddlers in diapers running across the grass, little guys sitting at a tiny wooden picnic table running their fingers over the letters of their names, painted there by my dad.  I can imagine my grampa pushing them in the old antique carriage that my own behind once sat in.  I can feel the structure of their little jaws and the softness of their faces under cool washcloths as I cleaned the Popsicle juice from their sticky cheeks. 

Not all achievements are hard-won.  The sacred and holy comes to us when we realize that life may not always be so, but often the living of it is easy.