And now, once again, it is five in the morning. I've been wide awake for an hour already, because my body feels compelled to spread the 20 cubic yards (enough to cover 3000+ square feet) of gravel that we had dumped in our driveway yesterday afternoon. I started to spread some of it yesterday afternoon, but I've barely made a dent in the piles. I'm anxious to continue on the project this morning, but it is still dark outside.
As Sam and I worked in the driveway yesterday afternoon, Sam wanted to chat about different topics to help keep him from being bored. His mild complaints of boredom made me think about how I reacted to work as a child. When I was a kid, especially when I was about nine and ten, I was very much interested in integrating work and play. Most of my playtime and pretending involved some type of work: starting up a restaurant with V called "Surprise Supreme," setting up a business called "[M] and Company" (in which I coerced my siblings A and C to work for me), organizing a ballet class for C and her neighbor friends, and building a ramshackle clubhouse out of wood scraps from our garage.
I would often ensure that these work situations were somehow unnecessarily intense, too. When I wanted to work, I would generate these romanticized situations in which I would need to desperately work. When I organized the ballet class for C and her friends, I rushed to the library to check out an oversized book on ballet; I needed to hurriedly research dance moves before "class" (because I really didn't know anything about ballet). When I built the ramshackle clubhouse, I worked all day long so I could finish the project in a single day. And, back when I was this age, my favorite thing to pretend at the time was that I lived in a forest and I desperately needed to gather food so I wouldn't starve. I would huddle in this little wooded area behind our garage, with my freshly-gathered stash of "edible" sticks and grass, pretending like I could carry on and survive in the forest for another day.
There was almost always some sense of urgency, desperation, or sacrifice in these play scenarios that I created as a child, and I realized yesterday that I haven't changed much. In order to save myself from boredom during this last month of summer, I've obsessively thrown myself into different house projects. Just this week I decided that we needed to clear out the weeds in the driveway. I had the idea that we could get the driveway paved, but after learning that option was too expensive after receiving a few bids, I decided to have these huge mounds of gravel delivered. But, as so often happens, I created a rather narrow window of time to finish this project. I needed to clear the driveway of weeds before the dump truck arrived, which meant that I needed to dedicate hours and hours each day to pulling weeds out of our driveway. And, as if the cosmos cheekily wanted to help me create an especially desperate and urgent situation, it has been raining quite a bit this week. So, I've been clearing out weeds in the rain, as our driveway (and the mossy carpet that has been growing in our driveway) has become muddy and sodden.
On Thursday, after an unusually heavy downpour of rain, J and I went into the driveway in a last-ditch effort to pull up weeds before the truck came the next morning. As we worked in the weeds and mud, kneeling down and practically crawling around to pick up globs of mossy mud and weeds, J said that he felt very much like the two figures in the "Constitutional Peasants" sketch from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. "Dennis, there's some lovely filth down here!" J called to me across the driveway while speaking in a high voice with a British accent. We both laughed, especially since we were creating piles of large piles of muddy weeds, similar to how the peasants build a big pile of mud while chatting with King Arthur. J even was pulling our compost bin around the driveway, similar to Dennis pulling his cart. I keep chuckling about the similarities between us and that sketch. What a desperate, silly situation I created! If anything, my nine-year-old self would have relished the dramatic, sacrificial scenario in which I had placed myself, down to the last raindrop.
It is just beginning to get light outside. I'm going to go outside and shovel gravel for a few hours before the boys wake up.
Update: I didn't end up shoveling gravel in the early morning, after all. My neighbor's bedroom had an open window right next to our driveway, and I thought it would be cruel to be working so loudly in the morning. Luckily, I did end up falling back asleep.
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