A Woodpecker Sort of Day

This morning when I let Norm out for the first time, there was a Flicker pounding away at the telephone pole in the corner of the back yard. I don't know if he knows there's meat in there or if he just hopes there is. Whichever, he keeps at it for a long time once he starts.

But it made me think that some days I feel like a woodpecker, hammering away against a figurative unyelding surface in the hope of getting to the meat of the matter, or getting the job done once and for all. Laundry and dishes and dusting are rather woodpeckerish endeavors. No matter how much you pound away at the laundry or the dishes or the dust, there will always be more laundry and more dishes and more dust, sometimes even before you are done with the ones you're working on.

So, come to think of it, is one of my favorite ways to spend the day, hunting ancestors. Find one ancestor and you invariably find more ancestors and then you have to find more and more information. Hammering away at the old dusty records in courthouses or the shiny new ones on the internet, it's still very woodpeckerish.

Outside the Seattle Art Museum is a large sculpture called "The Hammering Man". He hammers all day, all night, all the time, whack, whack, whack, just like the woodpecker. People often feel sorry for him even as they appreciate the sculpture. He works whether or not he wants to, just like the thousands of workers across the city, hammer, hammer, hammer, get the job done.

Everybody has got things they just keep pounding away at, over and over again.
I think this is why people need vacations and long hot baths, good books, fireplaces and hot chocolate.