There’s a bumper sticker I see fairly often around here, typically on the back of a rusty, beat-up old pickup truck that’s parked along the side of a road, within walking distance of a river or a stream. “Work is for people who don’t know how to fish,” the bumper sticker maintains. It occurred to me yesterday that Leah and our neighbors need to run out to a sporting good store and buy fishing gear. They were all doing way too much work.I could hear a tractor running over at our neighbor Gene’s place. I looked over the fence--isn’t it fun to watch other people doing work?--to see that Gene was cutting hay. Gene and his wife are retired, though you would never know it. They begin most mornings with a brisk four-mile walk down our road, then can be seen outside gardening, or splitting and stacking firewood, or brushing stain on the deck of their house.
There was band-bang-banging and clang-clang-clanging coming from another neighbors’ pasture. A farrier was at work there, shoeing horses. I ambled over with my camera--isn’t it fun to photograph other people doing work?--and as I talked to the farrier, I made a point of slipping it into our conversation that I’d spent the morning in my office at home, talking on the phone with clients, answering client e-mails, doing “business.” Sweat cascaded off the farrier’s face. I’d never seen a guy sweat that much. My morning of “work” suddenly felt like a day spent napping in a hammock.
Filled with more than a little guilt, I skulked back home, where I found Leah standing in our orchard, picking cherries. “Well, Tom Sawyer, maybe you could help me pick,” she wisecracked. I got up on a ladder and reached for the few remaining, high-in-the-tree cherries that Leah had been unable to reach from the ground. Up there on the ladder, it was cool to look down and see Leah in her straw hat, her bowl full of the fruit of her labor. I pulled my camera from my pocket and shot a few images, realizing that photography, this day, is not something I should call "work."
