How to Claim a Life

We bought a chess game; A beautiful mahogany, handcrafted coffee-table-conversation-piece that was to be my first step at backing away from this exhausting digital life we're all plugged into. Of course, the first thing I wanted to do was take a picture of how beautiful it looked in our living room and share it for the world to see. Alas, I refrained.

Instead, my husband and I sat with vodka coolers in hand on a Friday night and played three matches in a row, all of which I lost. I wondered if he knew of my plan to connect more to our little world, or perhaps he was simply rolling with this new, happier version of his wife?

We'd spent all day fixing up the front porch area of our home. Months (years?) of pollen and grime had settled on our white wicker chairs and glass tabletop. The overgrown lilac bushes had created a jungly tunnel to the front door, reaching its branches overhead towards the wildflower garden in front of the house. He hacked away at the branches while I washed away the dirt and swept up the debris. Satisfied with our day's work, we sat in our newly cleaned chairs with sun beating down on us and waved to neighbours that passed as we chatted about dinner options. I couldn't believe we'd neglected this area for so long, it felt good to sit and view the work we'd done, but also, to connect to the neighbourhood in a way that had felt missing since the pandemic.

After the chess games and with waning sunlight retracting itself from the neighborhood, I suggested we make one of the new teas we'd purchased earlier that day and watch the world go by on the porch again. I'd forgotten how we used to do this when we first moved in, ten years prior. I sipped on a lavender white tea while we counted twelve bumblebees making their way around the coneflowers and beebalm. A solitary monarch flitted her way around the bumbles, landing on milkweed and sipping nectar from the tops of the coneflowers. As the sky turned a deeper purple, one by one the bumblebees found their homes for the night; each under the petals of a coneflower while they clung upside-down for their night's rest. We laughed at how cute they looked, like little fuzzy bats under umbrellas.

Later that night, I let the dogs out for a pee and noticed how clear the sky was, with stars poking out from every direction. I ran back in and said I had an idea. Quickly grabbing a quilt, two couch cushions and our beach mat, I ran back out to the yard and rolled out the mat, placed the two pillows, and together we cozied up under the blanket to watch the stars. We both took a deep breath in and revelled in its beauty. I felt a sudden pang of guilt for how I'd spent so many years taking advantage of the magic of our planet. How many nights I'd spent watching mindless TV or scrolling on my phone until bedtime. How many nights had those same bumblebees slept just outside my front window under pink petals? And yet I dismissed it's perfection by not bearing witness to their little lives.

Within seconds a comet sprung across the sky right over our heads. In unison we gasped. It was incredible. How selfish of me to want another, to ask the Universe for a special treat to give us just one more. As if the colossal stage of stars and satellites weren't enough of a show for us - who for one moment in our lives have decided to stop and look up and demand an awe-inspiring show. We basked in the sky's beauty while our dogs played at our feet. It truly felt like a memory we would peer back into from time to time as we aged. The two dogs playing, the two of us star gazing on a mid summer's night. How had I missed out on this for so many years while instead lost in the daze of cell phones and streaming tv shows. It was a cataclysm of the human spirit. And the revelation of it hit me at my core.

The younger of the two dogs padded up to our heads and sniffed at our hairlines, curious. We asked her to lay down and she chose that very spot, between us, with her head resting on my chest. I teared up at the simple beauty of the moment and a second later she shifted her head to do the same on my husband's chest. I heard him say "aw," and knew he'd felt that same love swell up within him as well. We lay like that for another half hour, until the mosquitos found us, and midnight approached.

Upstairs in bed, I lay my head on the pillow and gave a satisfying sigh. I had successfully claimed that day as my own. The trick was to follow the recipe every day from here on out and claim a life of our own.