The days I keep my gratitude higher than my expectations, those are good days.
Ray Wylie Hubbard
I have suffered from insomnia for at least 65 years. Even as a small child, I had trouble sleeping, and my inability to nod off easily made me perpetually anxious about the coming day.
Perhaps this affliction could be traced to the stories my father told me when I was four years old about his years in a Japanese concentration camp during World War II. He often described fellow prisoners who starved themselves to death, committed suicide, or drowned when a prison ship sank and they didn't know how to swim.
I interpreted my father's stories to be a message that weak people die when confronted by hardship, and I felt certain at age four that I would never be strong enough to survive what my father endured as a Japanese prisoner of war. My father ate bugs and lizards to stay alive, and I could hardly swallow broccoli!
Or perhaps my nighttime anxieties sprang from my encounters with the hell-and-brimstone Protestant religion that my childhood friends practiced and my fantasies about roasting on hot coals for eternity because I was a Methodist and not baptized by immersion like my playmates.
Now I'm in the evening of life and sleep better, especially when I'm home on Lake Mary in southern Mississippi. Last weekend, I slept exceptionally well and awoke refreshed just before 5 AM. I told myself it would be a good day because I planned to mow my property's four-acre woodlot. I would start early and finish my work before the day turned hot.
Some of my family members are early risers and nearly always start the day before me, but I woke up long before dawn that morning. The darkened house was quiet when I walked into the kitchen. I pushed the brew button on Mr. Coffee, which began gurgling benignly, filling the kitchen with the heavenly fragrance of dark-roast Community coffee.
I found a pack of Pillsbury biscuits in the refrigerator and a pound of Wright's thick-cut smoked bacon. I opened the biscuit package, placed eight dough globs on a baking sheet, and slipped them in the oven to cook.
I fried bacon while the biscuits baked, and in a few moments, I had prepared a feast. I buttered the biscuits, smothered them with mayhaw jelly, and made bacon-and-jelly biscuit sandwiches, which I ate with my coffee.
Knox, my family's genial springer spaniel, woke when he heard me stirring. He smelled the bacon and came into the kitchen, subtly letting me know he was joining me for breakfast.
"No, Knox," I told him, "this bacon isn't for you," but I warmed a hot dog for him in the skillet and poured the warm bacon grease over his dry dog food. Knox seemed satisfied.
It was dark outside, and there was no sign yet of dawn. I sipped my coffee and ate my simple meal silently, pleasantly conscious that I had no morning newspaper to read or email to open.
Gradually, the sun introduced itself with long shadows creeping over the roof from the east and casting its pale light on Lake Mary. The lake was placid with no wind this morning, and the water looked bluish white in the predawn ambience.
Finally, the morning sun rose high enough to dominate the day, and it was light enough for me to begin mowing the four-acre woodlot with my zero-turn lawnmower. The grass was overlong because the mower broke down the last time I mowed, and it took me several days to get the replacement part I needed to drive the lawnmower blades.
Would my mower start? I asked myself, and suddenly recalled repeatedly pulling the starter rope on my family's Briggs & Stratton push mower when I was a kid. The misery!
Fortunately, my Toro zeo-turn mower has a battery, not a starter rope, and the engine roared to life with one turn of its key. I set the cutting level at three inches, and soon I was off, riding in padded comfort into the woodlot.
I drove slowly and cautiously to keep the long grass and weeds from overwhelming the mower. As I crept over the field, I stirred up dust and bugs, but I'd smeared insect repellent over me--the good stuff, laced with DEET. The bugs didn't bother me.
I remembered mowing 40-acre fields when I was young, pulling a brush hog behind my father's John Deere tractor hour after hour. I suffered from asthma as a teenager and self-medicated with double doses of Dristan--eight pills a day.
To stay hydrated on mowing days, I'd make a couple of gallons of Nestea instant tea in a plastic jug, sweeten it with copious amounts of sugar, and fill the jug with ice from the old-fashioned ice trays that I'd take from my family's venerable Frigidaire.
I would end every summer day of mowing covered with dust and grit and my face blackened by diesel smoke. Even my teeth would be black.
This day, however, I only had four acres to mow, and if I needed refreshment, I could get a cold beer out of the refrigerator--much better than powered instant tea.
If I cut my grass weekly, the mowing job takes less than three hours. It would take longer on this day because the grass was so long. Nevertheless, I was starting early while the day was still cool, and I would be shaded for much of the time by the lot's many trees--cypresses, red oaks, pecan trees, and sycamores.
And so I traversed my woodlot, moving along slowly and steadily, taking satisfaction from seeing my property slowly transformed into a neatly clipped, tree-shaded lawn.
I was finished before noon--just in time to watch the New Orleans Saints play the Cardinals. My wife grilled venison burgers from a deer I shot in January.
It was a good day. As Ray Wylie Hubbard might have said, my gratitude exceeded my expectations. I was grateful for my little piece of Mississippi ground, my wife and family, my riding lawnmower, my venison burger, and my cold beer.
