On podcasts and pine trees

a good idea is second only to a good spot in the woods

“I like your round bum in those shorts, slim,” I say.

“Hey,” says my spouse Janyce without turning around. She’s standing at the full wall of kitchen cabinets in her underwear fussing with the coffee maker. I’m watching her from the other side of the room, sitting sideways on the Ikea couch so I can also see out a window.

“Oh no, I don’t drink out of plastic coffee cups,” says Janyce, reaching higher on the shelf to bypass the large to-go cups for the smaller ceramic ones.

It’s Saturday morning and we’re in a new Airbnb in a tiny hamlet in the Hudson River Valley just over the Connecticut border. The place is a converted barn turned into a small apartment cottage. But the inside layout is not quite working, in my opinion.

“For one thing, why can’t we open the windows. I really don’t want the central air,” I say. The place is one big open space with the bedroom and bathroom in an adjacent back room. All the furniture is pushed against the walls. When you sit on the couch, you are looking directly at the kitchen cabinets with all the windows at your back.

“The Feng Shui is all wrong in here,” I say.

“Let’s sit outside,” says Janyce, handing me a coffee cup.

I’m feeling out of sorts still this morning from too much garlic last night, my restless night of sleep, and our bumpy reentry with each other.

“See, this is why I wanted you to call ahead and find out about the driveway,” said Janyce yesterday when I met her at the end of the long gravel driveway. I arrived in my car about 15 minutes before she did, before the soft purr of the Harley engine signaled her approach from way down the road.

“Maybe you could leave the bike here off to the side?” I said.

“But then how would I turn around? No. I need to get the bike down the driveway.” She held her helmet in her hand studying the rough downhill slope, her mouth a thin straight line.

I walked silently beside her as she took her time walking the motorcycle slowly and carefully down to the barn.

Janyce is reading her paperback beside me under a canopy of trees. I take a sip from my coffee cup and lean back onto the weathered cedar Adirondack chair.

The forecast was predicting rain for today but so far the sky is a hazy white with breaks of sunlight. Other than the occasional car passing on the street, the only sound is birdsong— robins trilling their signature melodic riff, and the neighbor’s rooster belting out a few crows. The air smells of hay and pine and mosquito spray.

“I was listening to podcasts the whole way here yesterday,” I say, adjusting my head back to look up into the tree canopy.

“Oh yeah?” says Janyce.

“Superage profiled one of those overachiever, type-A, adventure-warrior people,” I say.

“Yeah, did you get any tips?” says Janyce.

“I did, I think,” I say. “But I had to get past all the things that were bugging me about her, though — her money and her privilege— and the way she kept saying, ‘100 percent’ instead ‘yes,’ or ‘you’re right.’”

“Ahh,” says Janyce, folding her book closed and placing it on her lap.

The theme of all my podcast listening these days is how to balance my life for the present me and not miss out on right now while still paying attention to designing a life for the future me, so I can retire with financial ease, so I can still move when I’m old, so that I don’t have huge regrets about squandering my “one wild and precious life,” as Mary Oliver would say.

“It was interesting how she talked about her form of self care as a way of staying resilient so you can keep growing and learning.” I say. “She did this thing called ‘default days,’ where she had the day already planned out down to all the details. Exactly what her meals would be, her exact movement plan for the day, bedtime. But she would only use a default day fifty percent of the time.”

“We could try that if you want. You know that kind of thing is right up my alley,” says Janyce. “But won’t you get bored?”

“I think the key is in the fifty percent part and also that you spend some time figuring out how to craft the right default so it is something you really like,” I say.

“Speaking of something you really like,” says Janyce. “This is nice.” Suddenly the cicadas start a round of their loud buzzing and the chickens begin clucking from a distant part of the neighbor’s yard. I look up again to welcome a shaft of hot sunlight hitting my face through the cover of overhead leaves.

“It is nice,” I say. “All I needed to do was get out of the house and under the trees and now I feel better.”

“See? Self care,” says Janyce.

“You’re right, I say. “Let’s just be sure to add an hour of being in the woods as an essential part of our default day.”

“You got it,” she says.