Mr. Putter

If puttering isn't a Constitutional right, it should be.

I'm going to clean out my shed this weekend. Looking forward to it. I've been waiting now for nearly a month for enough snow to melt away in the back yard so I have enough room to haul a winter's worth of crud out of the shed, decide what to keep and what to throw away, and then put all the good stuff back in the shed while piling the refuse behind the fence in the alley to let the city deal with.

Why do I have so much crap, I wonder? Well, since at least half of the clutter in the shed is outdoor kids' toys, the big culprit here is winter. Not consumerism, because of all the bikes, trikes, wagons, sand toys and other detritus out there, only two items are not hand-me-downs. I think this is the year that we get rid of the little kid ride-in car, because none of our kids are small enough to fit inside it any more. We can pass it along to someone else, so someone else can trip over it in their shed or garage all winter long. Isaac won't like it, not one bit, but that'll get me motivation to get his bicycle fixed so he can tool around on that.

But back to puttering and the Constitutionality thereof. I am not looking forward to cleaning the shed because it needs to be cleaned (though it does in a serious way). I'm looking forward to cleaning the shed because it gives me license to putter. I can lazily sort nails. I can re-organize the Christmas lights (once I take them down off the house and trees). I can crush aluminum cans. All this while I'm day dreaming, listening to the birds, watching the kids rediscover the joys of playing in a backyard not buried under two feet of snow. It's not work. It's puttering. That things get cleaned up and organized while I putter is not the goal. The goal is the puttering. It's relaxation. It's doing something that needs to be done but at a pace that tells the world I could be at this all summer long and not despair if it didn't get done at all.

A Constitutional right? You bet. This is peaceably assembling. This is the right to bear arms, even if the arms I'm bearing are garden tools that have long fallen off their hooks. This is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, with the kids helping doing random things and the birds singing and the sun shining and the world setting itself to rights while I "work."