By Elizabeth Peavey

Wing nut

Why I was taking apart and cleaning my squirrel-proof birdfeeder this morning when I should’ve been working (writing this column, to be precise) will take a moment to explain, which I will do shortly. Understand, however: neither performing said task nor the delay of its explanation means I am a procrastinator. I am just the opposite. Aside from the fact I just spent more time than I should’ve looking online for a satisfactory antonym for procrastinator, which some might view as a form of procrastination, I am an expeditor. (Obviously, I came up short on my search.) 

I make things – lots of them – happen. Fast. But this can be confusing to an outside observer because, as is the case with many creative types (a.k.a. artistic geniuses), what I appear to be doing doesn’t necessarily reflect what I am actually doing at any given moment.

For example, anyone peering in my window right now might (aside from getting pushed from the ledge) see a freelance writer hard at work. Nothing could be further from the truth. As I type this sentence, I am mentally sectioning off the remainder of my afternoon. See, it’s 2 p.m. and I have just finished my daily lunch of miserable lentil soup. I must next schedule my coffee treat between now and beer time. Except that I am out of beer, which means I need to go to RSVP, and after I go to RSVP, I will have to continue on to the bank to cover the checks I just wrote for the month’s bills and mortgage. And while I’m out, I should probably stop at the grocery store and get something for dinner. John and I haven’t been home for days and there’s nothing in the house to eat. We cleaned up the last box of Annie’s Mac ‘n’ Cheese (a.k.a. the artistic genius’s Desperation Dinner) when we got home last night following a five-hour drive from Eustis in the blinding New Year’s Day snow storm with cars off the road all over the place. (Of course, all those cars wouldn’t have gone off the road if there hadn’t been so many morons out there doing one of two speeds on the highway: 25 or 80 m.p.h.) And because we got home two hours later than we’d planned, we only got a portion of the shoveling done, and it took me the rest of this morning to finish shoveling because I was intent on cleaning that feeder, too, which might seem like a waste of time. Ah, but that’s when I was writing this column. Not now.

As you are reading along here, you probably assume I just hit the return key, butau contraire, mon frere. In the space between the last paragraph and this one, I drove to the bank, went to the beer store and said to hell with groceries and a coffee treat, since it seemed all the New Year’s Day morons were still out on the road. Anyone hanging from my bumper would (aside from getting a mouthful of slush) assume I was running errands. In reality, I was writing this column. Because once I got on the coffee, beer and bank roll of the preceding paragraph, I couldn’t get off it. I had to get away from my desk to remind myself what this column is about, which is cleaning my birdfeeder.

(In case you think you have this all figured out, let me give you an example of why you do not. You probably assume that when I was having my lunch of miserable lentil soup, I was also writing my column. Wrong. When I was having my lunch, I was reading the December 23 Styles section of the Sunday Times to remind myself what horrible excuses for human beings most people with money or a modicum of celebrity are. The entire section was devoted to carping about Christmas presents that came up short – a trip to Italy, for example: “It wasn’t even a present,” griped the wife. “A trip is something we do together… You get to go, so it is for you also.” I read the Styles section each week to bolster my overwhelming sense of moral superiority, so that when I go out into the world I do not plow into some idiot who is so busy yakking into his cell phone about his plumbing business in his GMC Gargantuan that he doesn’t have time to stop for a red light – just for fun. In other words, my lunch break is to think about nothing.)

Anyway, the reason I came to be cleaning my birdfeeder started on New Year’s Eve. I know the following is going to cause Bollard editor Chris Busby to pound his head on his keyboard and wail, “I want the old street-smart, black-clad, bar-hopping, badmouthing Peavey back,” but on New Year’s Eve I was sitting in front of a fire, sipping (OK, slinging) a martini in the mountains of western Maine, playing a board game called The Great North American Bird Watching Trivia Game. No, I had not been kidnapped and subjected to torture by eco-terrorists. John and I had received the game for Christmas and saved it to play with my birding buddy and New Year’s hostess, Marguerite. The game includes a pile of cards called the Life List, which are akin to the Community Chest cards on a Monopoly board – they dole out penalties and rewards. John, for example, received a card early on in the game that entitled him to proceed roughly halfway around the board. Meanwhile, I kept getting penalty points: missing my turn for trampling wildflowers while trying to get a better look at a Chestnut-sided Warbler, backing up seven spaces for harassing a breeding Western Screech Owl. (Who knew these birders were so vindictive?) I also had to move back two spaces because I “forget to clean [my] feeder and several birds become ill.” And all this time I thought all those dead birds in my backyard were just casualties of West Nile. (Ha ha, just kidding.) 

(Actually, after playing this game, I should know better than to make dead-bird jokes within earshot of Audubon.)

So, the day after getting home from my trip, when I had a wall of work and a mountain of shoveling and a pile of laundry before me, I chose, instead, to first clean my feeder. And as I cleaned my feeder, I reflected on this past year with its worries and woes, and thought about how odd it is that I’ve become the type of person who can think of absolutely no better way to spend a holiday than in the North Woods with my Beloved and my beloved friends – sitting around the woodstove with Al and Lou, reading five sets of comics from five different Sunday papers; getting a thrill from a brown-creeper sighting out on the Narrow Gauge Trail; tallying up the critters at Marguerite’s feeder as she cooks her famous lucky black-eyed pea New Year’s Day brunch; and waking up safely back home on a semi-snow day in a shortened work week, which afforded me a little extra leisure time to do a homely task that did not need to be done. 

I could’ve turned out to be that carping Italy-trip chick. I, too, have had my stretches of being a horrible excuse for a human being. But as I grow older and outwardly duller and duller, my inner life bucks and roils with joy that I did not. And if being grateful for that fact ain’t a proper way to start the new year, I don’t know what is.

Move ahead four spaces.

Elizabeth Peavey is still black-clad and badmouthed. Her hops these days, however, are generally from her kitchen to her tub.