Twenty Minutes

This morning I awoke at 7:20 to find the house empty. Of course the tacky press board furniture was still present, as were the ratty towels, the cheap bedding, the perennial smell that permiates the kitchen now that the weather has switched from bearable to hot, and the roaches that invade "that corner" of the kitchen every night. Those things were all there, but the children were all gone, as was Tony, to a playdate, to school, and to work (yes, in that order). Mine was a house momentarily devoid of noise or responsibility.

One year ago, this never happened. Every morning was a typhoon of screaming as I was enveloped in the insanity of dragging three kids out the door by 7:20 in order to be in the right place at the right time. They were mornings riddled with steaming cups of tea left atop the car, book bags misplaced at the last minute, forgotten lunches, and "oops-peed-my-pants-just-now" sorts of incidents.

This morning, with the novelty of an empty house and an early hour before me, I could think, and I found myself weighing up the pros and cons of sustaining our current lifestyle and situation, but quickly threw away this philosophical bent in exchange for getting a jump on the chores du jour.

We have an automatic gate that protects our driveway, and house, from unwanted invasion--the only way to open or close the heavy metal gate is through one tiny remote control. Unfortunately we currently also have construction going on right outside that gate, and the worker men somehow keep causing our electricity to short so that that heavy metal gate will not open or close at all. After the last incident, I disabled the gate opener and now do the opening and closing by hand, much to the amusement of the construction workers who all drop their picks and shovels to watch me open and close my own gate.

Because I do not enjoy acting as daily entertainment for a sweaty conglomeration of migrant workers, the gate sits open more than it is closed now, and we have all manner of debris blow into our driveway and up our front steps. To put it plainly, we have become a sort of catch net for balls of thick black hair, bits of styrofoam, dead insects, snack wrappers, plastic water bottles, store flyers, and endless drifts of fine sand. To compound the problem, the kids and their friends have adopted the Omani philosophy of trash disposal, which is the drop wherever (in their case, usually our driveway) and saunter away philosophy. To put it simply, our driveway is gross and requires a massive output of effort to keep it clean.

So this was my chore of choice this morning--cleaning the driveway. I was thorough. I squatted underneath the trampoline and used the hand brush; I swept into the corners of the marble steps; I picked up the animal skulls and whale ribs we have accumulated over the months and swept; I wiped down the plastic chair and table where no one ever sits. I worked in the relative quiet (except for the construction workers) of the morning, sweeping, brushing, and dumping, and appreciated this comma in my life. For the time-being, the days of tea flying from the roof of the car and children sobbing over forgotten items at home are gone.

I realized as I brushed that, in the United States, I was always consumed with the 20 minutes that lay directly in front of me. In the mornings the kids had twenty minutes to get up and dressed for school, and twenty more minutes to choke down their tea and toast before making the twenty minute dash to their respective schools. Then they had twenty minutes to chill in my classroom until school began. At the end of the school day, I liked to take twenty minutes to close up my classroom after the last of the students had left.

Then I had a bit less than twenty minutes to get to the Y in order to make the first of the evening's exercise classes. After that I had about twenty minutes to pick up Tehva and get home in order to get dinner (ideal if I could prepare it in twenty minutes or less), and listen to Silas read for the teacher-recommended twenty minutes, which really never ever happend (but I signed the paper anyhow, like dozens of other parents I knew), before slumping off exhausted to the usual slew of evening activities--homework, Scouts, baseball, church groups, soccer, PTO meetings, and so on.

Imagining the years ahead I could hardly see beyond a life segmented into twenty minute chunks. The kids would grow up rushed through the minutiae of daily life ("Come on! We're going to be late! What are you doing? Hurry up!") and I would continue to clip my greys and wonder at where the endless series of twenty-minute blocks had gone.

Sweeping the piles of rubble against the walls of our drive in order that they not once again become scattered victims of the hot desert winds, I appreciated my sweeping chore, for today at least. Sweeping my driveway means that I am able to see farther and closer than twenty minutes, even if it has done nothing for my greys.