A nicer life

A major arctic outbreak arrived by winds during the night. They were strong—not desert strong, but many friends have told me they woke in the night as walls shook and groaned. “Northerly,” the weather alert simply called them. My parents five hours north watched them pass through from Oklahoma or maybe even Canada; my father sent me pictures of a yard draped in a wet sheet of snow.

Other changes in the morning were green leaves and twigs on the ground, scattered as by a mad little animal, and damp earth, though I never heard rain when I also woke in the night. The house I am helping to renovate sits at a lower elevation than its surrounding yards. Whatever water fell into the night accumulated here: a fenced square of mud and concrete blocks and wood. I spent the morning extracting nails from antique planks. The sky was blue. Some laborers in the house had a radio alternately playing Oldies and Tejano. I realized I hadn’t written in almost a month; I don’t have a lot of money; I remembered a story my friend recently told me; I thought about that verse in Thessalonians: Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands. I won’t say that I was cold, because I don’t remember being cold. I mostly only remember that story of a friend.

She had just dreamed of the end of the world. Every building, everywhere, was collapsing. She knew an engineer working to stop the destruction and had tried to help, but, ultimately, they both knew the effort was futile, was more about the comfort of hope than a real potential to stave off the apocalypse. “This isn’t going to work,” my friend admitted in the dream, and together they cried.

If I’m being honest I can say that I think about the end of the world often—I don’t think in a macabre way. An astrophysicist last night announced that in 5 billion years our galaxy will collide with the Andromeda Nebula; more immediate concerns are the climate, atomic weaponry, overpopulation, and this new fear of unemployment and health insurance and whether the fingernail I smashed on a board will fall off or grow septic. Maybe it was all the mud and rotting wood. I was working around atrophy, letting it cling to the soles of my shoes. A hundred years old, the house was ending; eventually everything will. I wasn’t scared of the “apocalypse.” I never am. It seems less like a possible horror than inevitable event: in a few months or twelve hundred years. I was happy in the sun, fulfilling that biblical ambition, anticipating a trip I’ll take soon. Why mind the business of God? I am content to let the world progress or crumble, to listen to it dreamily like to an arctic gust against the house. That is a nicer life: the quiet one.