Like Johnny Cash sings, "I was sittin' here thinkin' about old times," I often find myself doing just that now that I no longer head out the door each day to work at a job and am free to do whatever interests me. I think I've got some of the same Norwegian blood as the man I will relate in this true story. We were at a 50th wedding anniversary party a while back for a couple who lived close neighbors to Mary's family while she was growing up. One of this couple's daughters had been widowed and then found herself a new man, a Norwegian bachelor farmer. She is of the stout German stock that doesn't like foolishness, when it is time to work you need to get it done, and now! A group of us sat at a table, and she related a story of her new husband who she told does things in a slow, sometimes dreamy manner, and even occasionally works a team of draft horses in the field. On their farm both a small flock of sheep and small herd of cows ran, and the new couple split wintertime chores, she looking after the cows and he the sheep. One morning they went out to do their chores. As she finished her share she went back into the house to work at household jobs, and waited and waited for him. Finally she worried herself into going out to check on him. She found him laying on a haystack. She wondered what in the world he had been doing. "Oh, I thought it was such a nice day, so I lay down to watch the clouds sail by." Her German blood roiled up by this foolishness said, "You gotta be shittin' me!"
At times I feel those same looks from my wife, but some of us are built that way. I often tell Mary that I like to take it easy, but when I nod off for an afternoon nap she is almost as incredulous as her old neighbor. Whatever, I do have several things I am working at, and I find myself further along than I thought on one of them. I have written lots of poems over the past few years, and I plan to self-publish a booklet containing some of them. Both of my sons are good with drawing pencils so I have asked them each to furnish a few line drawings to illustrate the book. One son and his family will be here this weekend to attend a wedding, and I want to give him a draft to look at and be inspired to draw appropriate pictures.
I have been aiming at a publication date sometime next winter, but after taking inventory, I was surprised to find I have more than enough on hand now. So I will be busy for awhile getting it all put together. It will be a chapbook in form. The origin of the term chapbook comes from old English peddlers called chapmen who took their wares - pots, pans, cloth, thread, etc. - on a horsedrawn cart and roamed around selling to folks in the countryside. Some of the items they sold were small, inexpensive tracts or booklets of reading material, thus the word chapbook took on meaning in our present day as a small, inexpensive, self-published book of poems. Now I'm ready to take a nap.
