A Day's Work

I got a bit overzealous yesterday, wrote out four pages by hand and had no energy left to write anymore. This has me thinking about the idea of work. What makes work valuable? I have spent the last three years writing a short story collection inspired by my three great-aunts, nuns in different orders, all of whom took a vow of poverty and worked their entire lives without seeing a paycheck with their names on it. And yet when I called the Daughters of Charity to find out about my Aunt Helen (Sister Laura Stricker), the woman on the phone knew her by name.

 

"You are her great-neice? You will need at least a week to go through our archives about Sister Laura. She worked for more than sixty years at our Leprosorium in Louisana."

 

 

I also found letters from former students of my Aunt Margaret, and notes about how her teaching helped them work through difficult points in their lives. One woman continued to write a letter each Christmas until my aunt's death in the 80s.

 

I come from a long line of hard-workers: parents who grew up during the Great Depression and World War II; a grandmother who could have appeared in a Rosie the Riveter Sign; great-grandparents who immigrated from Germany to settle farmland in Southern Indiana. My parents moved to the "country" themselves, taking my four siblings and me along with them, to settle their own 3/4 acre farm. We collected eggs from our chickens, picked blackberries and apples which were canned for jelly, woke at 7am to weed the garden every morning during summer break, donning wide-brimmed straw hats that my father purchased for us. My dad worked more than 35 years in the maintenance department of the hospital, and my mother worked both inside and outside the home, doing whatever job she could get until she finally opened her own business training and supporting home childcare providers.

 

So this morning, while poaching an egg that I collected from my one of my four hens (If you have never lifted an egg warm from the nesting box, you really should try it. If it is still damp from being laid, all the better.), I am reflecting on a conversation with my youngest child last night. Conversation may be a bit too pleasant of a word; it was more one-sided than that. She was writing her weekly Current Events assignment for Humanties, on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. I was sitting at the kitchen table, writing my final page of Anna Karenina. My almost seventeen-year-old was washing the dinner dishes at the sink.

 

"Mom, when did the outbreak start?" asks 12.

"I'm don't know. You'll have to look it up," I say, my hands and eyes still on the page.

"Why can't you just tell me?"

"Because I'm working."

"You're not working. You're just writing some dumb book."

 

At this point, Almost 17 stops her work and looks over, silent.

 

I don't remember the words spoken after that. I'm not sure there were any until, after I have taken away her iPod (yes, I let her listen to music while sitting at the computer; don't judge.), 12 spews forth a variety of insults about what I am doing wrong. She is not a bad kid, just a kid who doesn't want to work any harder than she has to. Not to sound like the parent who walked to school both ways, in the snow, uphill, but she, and others of her generation, have not had to work hard, actually physically labor, at many things. She settled down, apologized and finished her work. And I did too. I closed by binder, shut off all the lights and went straight to bed. I was exhausted.

 

Today, I am going to pick pears at a friend's house. Tomorrow I will be canning, another form of labor that my mother, thank goodness, taught me. I won't get paid for that work, just as I won't get paid for this project, but I will see the fruits of my labor, in jars of food lining a basement shelf, and clean white page after page filled with words that I have written by hand, and in the sight of my bed at the end of a long day. I will sigh as I lay my body down on it, my shoulder against the sheet, my arm wrapped around extra pillow to ease the ache. And I will sleep until morning, when I get up to do it again.

 

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