Saturday Morning Reflections

I've had this idea bouncing around in my head for awhile now and finally decided to go ahead and get it written. Plus I had a writing assignment due, so it all works. Now, my teacher is happy with a lot less than Mr Smith, so I feel she's not pushing me to my full potential. So I'm not entirely happy with and plan to go back and revise it. But I'll go ahead and publish it for now and see what happens.

This was when we were thinking we were going to move to Columbi, MO, and Dad was trying to get our house fixed up for selling. And I really wanted to move. We did move, but not that far...

"Saturday Morning Reflections"


For a June morning, the air was surprisingly cool. My dad, ever the project-man, decided it would be a fantastic day to paint the shed. A forty-by-forty structure in the back of the house, had been awaiting a fresh coat of paint for a long time, and because the weather was so spring-like, we decided to tackle the job. My dad also knew that I loved to paint, and had asked to help with several painting jobs around the house a couple of times before.
After he had asked for my help, I changed quickly in old clothes and stepped outside. Like an artist before his canvas, I surveyed my surroundings. June in Alabama is a notoriously a hot month, but that morning the temperature could not have been above sixty-five degrees. Our yard, covered in pine trees, housed many birds and even they were chirping away in the cool breezes. The crisp air filled my lungs and I felt ready to tackle the world. My dad, also decked out in old work clothes, arrived carrying a ladder, a tin of paint and a couple of different paintbrushes. I helped him set the ladder straight, poured the pale blue paint into a pan and secured several rags in case I made some mistakes. For a few minutes, he showed me like a professional how to balance on the ladder, keep the paint from spilling, and how to take long even strokes without leaving any bubbles.
“I’ll check back with you in an hour or so,” he asserted after making sure I would not kill myself, or anyone else. I had not been known to do this, but Dad said we could never be too careful. The shed had about forty boards going horizontally and only two of its sides would receive a fresh coat. Each board was about ten feet long and after painting two or three, I realized that this would be an all day job. About a half hour later, when I was nowhere near being done, my older brother strolled by and joked, “You missed a spot.” “Oh, ha, ha, ha,” I replied, and he left still laughing to himself.
The day began to heat up as the sun rose, but it was always bearable. Breezes always wisped past my face relieving any unwanted heat. However, the work soon became tedious and my arm began to hurt with the constant back and forth motion. The birds faded away and the energy was sucked from my surrounding like soap going down the sink. My brush drooped and a few bubbles began to appear. “Darn it,” I thought, quickly correcting them, “I hope Dad doesn’t see.”
A fault of mine is to look ahead when doing a job and see if I can skim over or rush through any of the steps. My eyes flashed over the rest of the dirty blue boards. Could I skip any of them? The clean pale blue boards answered back a resounding no! Everywhere I did not paint was going to be conspicuous. Boards 1-40 stood tall and unmoving and their silence bellowed loudly, demanding to be painted.
I resigned myself begrudgingly to my fate; I had to paint all the boards. Any idea otherwise would just be foolish. Why would I only paint some of the shed? The whole thing would suffer if I did. Thus, I pressed on, going back and forth with the thick brush. Sticky paint clung to my hands and my muscles cramped.
Continuing with the paint in my hands and the smell of sweat on my neck, I began to think about other things in life that I could not skip. As a high school student, I felt stuck and that I was just waiting around for life to begin. I so desperately wanted to skip ahead, and to graduate, go to college, get married and have kids. I felt life could not really start until all of that happened and life now was just “wasted”.
As I looked at the shed, I realized that every single board was important to the whole appearance. What would it look like if I skipped three boards in a row? The gap that would leave would not be pretty. It would be ugly and detrimental.
What would happen if I skipped a couple of years of my life? Would that, too, leave a hole? I realized that everyone has to go through these years as preparation before becoming independent. No one gets to skip ahead and even if that were possible, the result would not be beautiful, like the half-finished shed.
A couple of hours, a few gallons of paint, two tired arms and one aching back later, I was done. Any artisan takes pleasure in seeing the finished product, and I was no different. The fresh coat of paint transformed the thirteen-year-old shed and made it look sparkling new. Each board, 1-40, stood proud, and because there were no gaps, it truly gave a picture of completeness.
Because of what the shed, and my own laziness taught me I approached life with different meaning. Instead of being stuck and bored, I could think of my life as on board number seventeen. This year is also just as important to the portrait of my life as the boards in the future will be, and I can enjoy the way life is unfolding right now.