A Day In The Journey

Around this time of year (ie a week and a half before school starts), I begin trying desperately to avoid the final stages of school preparation. Mind you, it isn’t that I don’t have a moderately sick love of school things, or that I don’t appreciate the beauty of having well-done preparations. Rather it is my constant fault of getting to the 3/4 or 7/8 mark and being “done.” Surely my readers understand that feeling. It’s the one where you’ve been spring cleaning and you only have to beat out the rugs and mop the kitchen, but you have just reached your limit…you’re done. It’s the one where you’ve complete 5 hours of the 6 hour drive and you are beyond ready to have arrived…you’re done. This is where I find myself at this point in the approach to the school year: wanting to have the completed and beautifully organized lesson plans and preparations all finished, but no longer having the desire to finish them.

Typically, I reach this point and brace myself to soldier through. This year, however, I stumbled upon a better plan. More accurately, a friend slipped a thought into my brain, and I latched on. Rather than soldiering through, I should find some other person to complete my work for me. I should, in fact, capture an elf! Yes, the more I thought it through, the more it made sense. After all, elves do beautiful work. Their quality is unmatched; their ardour to complete a task unquenched. The idea of hiring one did, I will say, cross my mind, but was almost immediately stymied by the realization that elves do not typically advertise in the “job wanted” section of the newspaper. Furthermore, I suspected that money was not an object of their desire, and I could think of nothing that I possessed that elves might find a fit trade for their labour. No, no. The more I pondered the situation, the more I was left with only a single path: I must capture an elf if I wished to avoid my work.

The first question raised was, of course, what could I use to capture an elf? This proved to be problematic for my brain at that moment, so I pushed the question aside for later examination. Instead, I turned to the next question at hand: where to begin looking for my elf. Of course, it is common knowledge that the elven kind prefer greenery and poetic scenery, so I began my search in the gardens.

I looked into the rose vines first, thinking that although the blooms were spent, the nature of the rose would be attractive to the elves. Yet, I found none.

I turned next to some obliging daylilies.

Again, there was no elf to be found.

I checked among other flowers and plants that seemed conducive to housing or hiding elves.

I even ventured to look into a particularly intriguing tree.

Yet all my efforts were to no avail.

They pointed me in the direction of a clump of rushes near the pond.

Although I looked quite carefully, I still had not found my elf.

At this point, it began to rain, so I was forced to postpone my search for a time. The rain was lovely, and I crossed my fingers in the hope that it might cause the elves to venture out afterward in search of after-storm beauty.

I began poking around behind the back shed, but my search was abruptly halted by a canine constable who advised me that trespassing in the area of the shed was “highly discouraged.”

I obligingly removed my search to another location.

After having exhausted every place I thought likely to house an elf, I began to feel my quest a lost one. Out of places to check, I decided to sit by the pond and wait for inspiration.

It was lovely. Frogs were singing. Mist was rising from the pond. The sun began to set in rare form. I paused, contented, to watch for a moment.

As the stars, and the mosquitoes, began to come out, I decided I had better be content to abandon my quest and finish my work on my own. My grand scheme for capturing an elf and save myself some trouble had fallen to ruin around me as I had been completely unable to even find one. I suppose it was all good and well, however, since I had never quite figured out how I might capture one anyway had I managed to find it. “Perhaps another year will bring success,” I thought as I returned to the house and my laptop and my meticulously saved lesson plans.