The first thing I noticed to be changing was time. While realizing that other geniuses like Einstein, Salvador Dali, and Doc Brown (of Back to the Future fame) have managed to fiddle with its apparent steady progression, I’ve migrated to a more nativist concept, one common in the far North, where the Cree and Inuit still often disregard the absurd civilized notion of linear time. After spending decades living from job to job as a contractor, bound to a never-varying, Sisyphean round of projects and paydays (not my favorite days, once I became the payer, instead of the payee), I now find myself at loose ends, with years of necessary personal projects ahead. The Northern model begins to look ever more attractive.

Thus my Thursdays are indistinguishable from Mondays, and Fridays (except for a cave-time breakfast with a few pals) indistinguishable from Wednesdays. Without checking my journal, I have difficulty remembering how long we’ve lived here, when the dog died, when I last broke my leg. The desk calendar directly beneath my keyboard is littered with appointments for the month – Truck to dealer for service; Paddle Connecticut with Scott; Pay credit card; Leave for Greenville, Maine – and I look forward to all of them. But then I think, whoa! Wait a minute! Where have the years all gone? How many months you got left? Don’t be so eager to gobble them up.

Time has become amorphous and hazy, like one of those beautiful, bubbly nebulae photographed by the Hubble telescope. It still has a general pattern, just as the nebulae do, but it lacks firm definition. The list of jobs still to do around the place is longer than ever, but there’s no way to answer the question, is there enough time left to do them all? And what would happen if they were all to be completed? What then? Don’t we always need work to get back to?

Which leads to the second phenomenon. While time has gone a-wandering, disdaining the discipline of the watch on my wrist and the satellite-regulated clocks everywhere in the house, work seems to be doing an odd thing, as well: It’s going backward. Seems the more I do, the more there is still to be done.

Now and then I get disgusted at the clutter on my workbench. It’s not tools; each of them has a place, and is in it. It’s stuff I’ve gotten for various projects. There’s duct material for running a wood stove intake to the outdoors. There are electric boxes, plugs, and switches for changes to existing wiring. And just a couple of weeks ago, prompted by recent amateur burglaries in our neighborhood, I disinterred a brand-new, but buried, motion-detecting outside light and vowed to install it that day in the rear gable of the house.

There was nothing to it. A coil of Romex wire lay ready in the attic for the purpose. I’d simply bore a hole in the wall, climb up a ladder outside, cut in a small block for mounting the light; paint it, and install the fixture – a very serious-looking (and expensive) German model.

But then I thought, while I’m running this wire through the attic, I ought to stop and put in a few electrical outlets in the partially completed knee wall along the way. Somebody may want to finish off this room someday. Before I do that, however, I’ve got to complete the knee wall.

I measured the length of the knee wall studs – just over 50 inches. Nuts! I couldn’t get two out of an 8-footer. I started a materials list on a piece of cardboard. Then I remembered that the Energy Conservation people wanted me to put an additional 9 inches of insulation between the roof rafters. So I dragged the air compressor up to the attic to run the staple gun. (Why don’t I use just a regular staple gun? Because years ago a truck driver misread my order for 5,000 power staples and instead brought me 50,000. I’m going to use them up before I go!)

Squirming around in the acute angle between the rafters and the attic floor was probably the best exercise I’d had in months. The face mask I was wearing kept fogging up my specs, but a few hours later I was ready to start finishing the knee wall.

Then I thought, wait a minute! Whoever finishes this room is going to want to insulate the knee wall, too. What can I nail to the back of it to hold the fiberglass in place? And how am I going to do that? I’d be walling myself in. I finally settled on a plan. I’d cut some foam board to size, slide it in between the studs, and then go down to the end of the driveway to wait for the perfect person to go by: a pygmy with carpentry skills who can see in the dark and who’ll work for peanuts. If he gives me grief, I’ll leave him in there, like Fortunato with his cask of Amontillado.

At the moment, the compressor is still up there, the foam board lies cut and uninstalled, the rafters still need two more batts of insulation, and the initial job – the installation of the outside light – is farther from completion now than it was when I started. As Charlie Brown says, “Sigh...”