Boredom Sounds

I search out my homeliest clothes. My baggy jeans with a rip in the right leg caused by my running into the protruding latch of an old hutch. I roll up the jeans like my mother used to do in the 50’s, you know, so they look like pedal pushers. Wholesome and sporty. I throw on the black and white striped top faded by having been washed 500 times. The label at the neck still sticks up after all this time. I love this shirt, but it’s been off, so to speak, from the beginning. Awry. Askew. I wear thick white ankle socks and ten-year old sneakers but topping it all is my up-north hat, a woven smash hat with a bendable brim. And earrings. Always earrings, today’s are tiny stacks of stones a tourist might think come from Lake Superior. They don’t but nobody cares.

Nobody sees me except my husband. He is wearing a souvenir basketball team t-shirt tucked into sweatpants which he has pulled up to over his knees because it is a bit hot sitting on the porch of our place on Lake Superior. Oddly hot for this early in the year but if we moved to the other side of the house, it would be cold, so it’s important to have adjustable clothing.

Because he has a bad back, my husband also wears a back brace. The combination of his tucked-in t-shirt and his back brace give the appearance of his pants coming up to just under his armpits. I laugh at this while we discuss the topic of boredom and a question occurs to me, looking at my own clothing choices and his extreme high-rise pants, what are we doing in these get-ups?

He has just awakened from his second nap of the day. It is 2:00 p.m. Eschewing naps always, I sit in the sun on the porch and begin reading a 636-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book published in 1986. The cover is pristine, but the pages’ edges have yellowed. I have no idea how the book came to be at our summer house, a pretentious a term as there ever was for a place we bought with money left to us by a dear relative, but it is a house and we only use it in the summer so summer house it is.

The book is gripping but I am soon aware of being asleep myself. I wake up only long enough to glance at myself and then fall back asleep. The dog lies stretched out on an old rug. He is also sleeping. The cat is not heard from because he is locked in a back bedroom lest he sneak out one of the open doors unprotected by the screens we forgot to pick up from the repair shop. Earlier when we walked the dog, I got an alert from the people who manage the Apple Air Tag system, a thing we bought into when our neighbor’s cat got lost, ended up on our back porch (this was back home, not at our summer house), and we took the cat to the pound. This was a mortifying event even though it ended well, well, well enough, and so we decided we should put an air tag on our own cat, in case he got lost, but then today, on our walk we got a text message saying, “Hercules [our cat] has been left behind.” He had indeed been left behind, intentionally, but still we worried that his small gray face might pop up from the beach grass any moment.

We tighten the screws holding the screens on the two side windows. We are proud that, unlike previous years, the screens haven’t taken flight during some horrible Lake Superior winter gale. Sometimes, we’ve had to retrieve them from in front of the neighbor’s house while he watched from his porch. The judging was silent but harsh. This year, the neighbor is not there so he doesn’t know about our tiny home maintenance triumph.

There is a bird flying into one of our bird houses. We have six bird houses in front of our house, set on wood poles sunk into old buckets full of Redi-Crete. The birdhouses are painted different colors, mostly blue, a few of them have daisies painted on them or interpretations of sky and surf. The birdhouses are for the barn swallows and, also, to stoke our emerging eccentricity. There are also birdhouses on the old woodshed next to our house. These are painted but not as nice as the premier display because we want to present a bit of a rundown feel to someone building a monstrous house next to ours. We keep our canoe on an old set of bedsprings next to the house for the same reason and because it is convenient and a good reuse of something we couldn’t get rid of up here anyway. There is a clothesline, too, that we put up last summer when our dryer died. Now we have a new dryer, but we like the clothesline an awful lot. It speaks earnestness and thrift. And the clothespins are made of wood.

A tiny caravan of ants travels from the top of the kitchen sink up the white wall to the window ledge where there are dozens of small rocks from the Lake Superior beach, all, I thought at the time, shaped like hearts, not actual hearts, but the hearts one might carve in a tree. Once on the ledge, the ants disappear into the rock forest. We have had ants here but not for a long time, so my husband goes to the hardware store to get ant buttons to kill the ants.

We sit on the porch drinking our morning coffee. There is no wind, and the lake is very still. Three boats sit as if in a painting. While I watch the boats, my husband reactivates our discussion from the day before, about boredom, the dimensions of boredom, and how people need to accept boredom into their lives. I say these things, not him, since he dislikes boredom and avoids it whenever possible.

“It takes a lot of creativity and get up and go to sit down and do nothing,” he says. He then talks about how a person needs a playlist in their head to deal with times of boredom, and he begins singing a song from the 70’s which I only vaguely remember. He has a vast repertoire of songs in his head and can sing them all, usually all the verses, whenever the time is right.

I say no, I don’t have a playlist, well, I do sometimes but it’s usually one song that gets stuck like the needle in the wrong groove in an old LP. I tell him that my mind can be vacant while I just look at the three boats. I also listen to the birds – the ones in the distance, probably geese, and the nearer ones, probably gulls. All of it is good, good enough. Especially if one is empty except for coffee. And maybe a donut. The powdered sugar donut is its own music.

On our way back from somewhere, I ask what was the “sounds” that one of the Beach Boys made an album about, the one we saw in concert who had someone lead him on to the stage to his keyboard because he had so much trouble navigating. I think his name is Dennis Wilson, but it is Brian Wilson and, my husband says, “Pet Sounds, that was the name of the album.”

I ask because I am thinking of “Boredom Sounds,” the richness of boredom, the birdhouses and the boats, the clothesline and the wooden clothespins which I would like to paint with daisies and blue sky. I am thinking of stillness and the giant crow that just landed on the railing on our porch looking at me and waiting for my reaction. I have none. That the crow showed up is enough.