Bliss

by Donna Schoenkopf

It is about two in the afternoon.

All eight of the sliding glass doors are open.

It’s cool and wet outside.

A gentle rain falls. It falls straight down. No wind blows. Everything is green except that burst of yellow in the grove near the pond.

There is no separation between me and the world outside except the roof.

Eden.

I just finished sweeping the floor about ten minutes ago. With a Bissell. You know, the kind your mother (if you are as old as I) used when you were a child.

I had gone to buy SOMETHING to vacuum my floors—a neverending chore (if you let it be) around here. Nothing, including the shop vac and the rechargeable vacuum cleaner, was doing the trick. The shop vac sucked the rugs up into its maw and the rechargeable was too weak to make a dent in what came into the house. And what comes into the house is TONS of cat and dog hair, mud, dirt, dust, grass, weeds, and stickers.

(We have no ticks. The borax in the rugs has kept THIS house tick-free.)

I was deciding what the hell I was going to do about it, as I stood in Kmart looking at my options, when my eyes fell on the Bissell box. It had a picture of a woman using a Bissell with the words No electricity required and Natural sweeping. It’s official brand name is Bissell Natural Sweep.

I laughed out loud.

I remembered how it used to feel, pushing a Bissell. Pushing and pushing across the rugs and watching the thingies disappear into its innards.

I bought it.

And I swept today.

And I am here to testify that it was the most rewarding vacuuming experience I’ve ever had.

It cleans WAAAAY better than my rechargeable, and doesn’t suck up the rugs like the shop vac.

I look back over my house and see a nice, clean floor.

And ...

I now have a slight endorphin rush of that fabulous sense of well-being.

The rain still gently falls as I write this. The sound is soft on the roof. Puddles of water sit in the seats of the green plastic chairs on the deck.

The deck loves the rain.

The Wood Guy at the lumber store told me that heat is the enemy of decks and will dry out and warp the wood, which causes it to crack, so summer is the danger time for decks.

I suppose mold and mildew can rot the deck, but looking at it now, all wet and shiny, it appears to be alive and happy.

Diego lies on the rug. He has his whole snout in his tennis shoe, just inhaling the delicious odors inside, and his sock rope is by his side.

He is in a state of bliss.

He loves being inside when it rains. I think the thunder and lightning made home a great place to be when it rains. Most rains here are part of huge and dangerous thunderstorms. He’s learned to hightail it home when it rains.

He loves being at home as much as he loves being at Jim’s or Orval’s for gophers, and he LOVES catching gophers.

He and Sallie the Dog have dug holes all over Jim’s property and caught a bunch of them. Jim says it’s a good thing and he’s glad the dogs are getting them.

A while ago Diego came running up to me when I stopped at Jim’s. He held a dead baby rabbit gently between his jaws. It was really a pretty little thing. Jim was all happy about it and said, “Hope he catches some gophers as good as he caught this rabbit.”

And he does. And Jim doesn’t mind filling up the holes. He says.

Orval says he fed my dog last week. When I looked at him with a “Huh?” look, he said he had a dead gopher in his hand when Diego came up and wanted it so Orval gave it to him.

No wonder he can’t help himself with the cats.

Speaking of cats, they are sitting by the open door, watching the rain. They are as mesmerized as I am. They are inhaling the cleanness and feeling the freshness of the air. Cats are great at experiencing every tiny little thing.

In the “now.”

Bliss.

I’m looking at the pond. I saw a bolt of lightning hit it a few days ago.

Yes.

I saw it hit.

With my own eyes. A blue-white bolt of electricity from the sky to the water. In the dark.

The whole pond lit up.

B I G thunder.

Whew!

Knowing that the lightning is attracted to water more than anything else reassures me.

I need reassurance because I feel exposed to the million-degree lightning bolts up here on the hill. The Internet says it’s the worst place to be in a lightning storm.

But I have seen two lightning bolts hit the pond since I’ve lived here. Lightning likes it, and the tall, tall ash tree (the one which the owl perches on in the late evening, the one which stands on the banks of the pond) has half its side dead from a lightning strike. Peewee tells me lightning likes ash trees most of all.

Is it that ash trees have more water in them?

I wonder if lightning kills the fish in the pond when it strikes.

Che the Cat licks his non-existent testicles next to my computer as I write this.

Now he’s working on the space between his toes. He stretches his foot straight out and bends his head to his foot and spreads his toes and licks between them.

Bliss.

The sunflowers are leaving me. They hang heavy from the rain. Their long stalks lie horizontally across the ground. Their flowers are smaller than they were last week and their lower leaves are brown and ready to go. Over half of the flowers have lost their petals and only the dark brown, almost empty-of-seeds “face” of the sunflower remains. Tiny birds have been working on those seeds for weeks.

Still it rains. It’s getting cooler. And darker. I’m comfortable with all the doors open.

Ohhhh.

The rain is now coming down heavily. A semi-deluge. I am learning signs of weather: Darkening of the light and deepening coolness, heavier rain.

The sound of the rain on my roof is now like the roar of a crowd in a coliseum.

I watch the torrent. It’s so heavy I can’t see down to the pond.

The sound is deafening.

I can’t see outside, except for a few feet out onto the deck. The animals are all awake and alert. We all kind of pace around. There is tremendous energy in the air. And nourishment.

And now there is a brightening. The gentle rain returns, and even it lifts and stops.

A brown soggy oak leaf falls from the spooky oak down the hill. It is so quiet I can hear the sounds of the fat drops off the edge of the roof hitting the deck.

And now, again, the light patter of fairy rain on the roof.

Bliss.

I look to my right, off to the west, and I see tall clusters of white delicate flowers. They are wild indigo. They were here last year, too, and I’ve been waiting for them. They are like huge bridal bouquets. They grow on woody six foot tall stalks, have no leaves that I can see, and explode in a spray of white against the green.

(After their bloom time is over and they are a dead husk of what they’ve been, they leave behind those tall woody stems and I pull them easily from the clay and throw them like spears down to the bottom of the hill.)

There is a swath of dead grass across the south side of my “yard.”

Why, you ask?

Well, Neighbor Orval fixed my lawnmower last week because I wanted to mow the dense and deep Bermuda grass that I had tenderly watered all last and this year.

(I am rewarded with the lushest, greenest spot of all Chigger Lake—the spot Diego the Dog loves to nest in, under the cottonwood tree. But I digress.)

I pulled the starter rope a few times and, waddaya know, it started! Filled with a sense of power and purpose I started mowing the east “yard” by the Outdoor Shower and then proceeded around the corner of the house, around the DISH satellite dish and then pointed myself and the lawnmower toward the patch of thick Bermuda grass.

I pushed into it and watched in horror as the grass was pulled from the ground OR was laid flat on the ground.

GODDAMMIT!!!

And now, today, I look at the two week old strip of ripped and smashed grass and see no green. It sits there as a rebuff to my efforts at taming the “yard.”

I’m starting to get hungry.

There’s couscous in the refrigerator. It beckons.

I think I’ll saute some onions and peppers and tomatoes with some salt and pepper and garlic and olive oil, maybe some lemon juice and/or balsamic vinegar, add the couscous to the whole thing, and have lunch.

Bliss.

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