August afternoon

Jane sat in her back yard, her laptop plugged into an extension cord that stretched across the patio and lawn. Don put the cord there for her after she told him that she intended to write outside today. She told herself that she would write at least 500 words, a blog entry anyway, but so far no inspiration came. Insipid sentences spooled out beneath her fingers: “It is so hard to wait,” “My daughter is getting ready to go to work,” “I was walking Mookie the other day and…” She remembered what one of her teachers had said, back in grad school. “If it bores you, don’t put it out there.” Denis had been talking about how to conduct oneself in I group, but it seemed appropriate for writing also. Everything bored her today. She felt restless, ineffective, uninteresting. Why would anyone want to read what she wrote?
Distracted, she looked around her. Her suburban back yard, half shaded and half sunny at this mid-afternoon hour, was bordered on one side by a stone patio and on the other side by shrubs and irises. The iris blossoms, bone-gray and withered, were long past their prime. Someone should prune those, she thought. One end of the yard was fenced and the other had a rose hedge that Don had planted seven years ago, most of which received too little sun to thrive. Against the fence grew rosemary and lavender and three sweet pepper plants, one of them bearing a few fruits, the other two having reached a foot high and stopped there, as if the soil were only fertile enough for one plant. Mookie lay sleeping under Jane’s chair, having finished his afternoon squirrel chase and perimeter patrol, his soft coat cozy next to her bare feet. A breeze stirred the maple branches in the neighbor’s yard. Jane put on her sweater. The wind died. She took the sweater off again.
Passion, that’s what she needed. To care enough about something to live it, really inhabit it, and then watch it take shape in pixels on her computer screen. If she could just feel passionately about something, the writing would be easy, wouldn’t it?, she wondered. Her children had it. Samantha was 21, partway through college and working in a little art gallery on Queen Anne. She had a new boyfriend and they spent all their spare time together. John was 17, and about to enter his senior year in high school. He too had a new boyfriend, a sweet young man who had just graduated from high school and who had spent the past months showering John with affection and attention. Jane heard the way her children laughed when they talked with their lovers on the phone, saw the way they paced the front hall waiting for them to arrive, smelled the extra cologne they doused themselves with, noticed the gleam in their eyes and the flush on their cheeks when they came in from a date. She remembered the way it felt to be newly in love, and she wondered how to capture that feeling again, here in her menopausal middle age.
It was not that she wanted a new lover, no, she did not want that sort of complication. She and Don would celebrate 28 years of marriage in a few days. Their marriage was comfortable, familiar, friendly, but hardly ever passionate, even when they fought. She didn’t want to risk that for a little mid-life romance. No, what she needed was a legitimate cause, something to focus her energies on. Her children no longer needed her, and her career was on hiatus since she had finished grad school and left her fulltime job. She could do more volunteer work at church. She could start trying to market herself as a consultant and coach. She could stop playing at writing and get something finished and published. She could train for a marathon instead of just running a few miles a day. She could take up one of her many hobbies and perfect it. Yet each time she threw herself into one of these ideas, her enthusiasm waned after a few weeks and she would find herself bored, listless, at wit’s end.