is this boredom?

I have a distinct memory of standing by myself in the woods outside our house when I was 7 or 8, and thinking to myself: "I am having a happy childhood." We lived out in the country, and I never knew boredom.

Ellen and I would flatten the alfalfa, which grew taller than we were, into hallways and rooms. We would walk into the grass and disappear, but be among chambers and passageways that snaked through the field. Man, we must have been pretty short.

We spent entire days in the maple tree up near Pop's garden. Each kid had a branch that was his or her room. We were busy doing nothing. I stood in the stream and studied water in motion, gathered frogs' eggs in clumps, then later cornered pollywogs in the cup of my hand. We tried to keep Japanese beetles away from the perfectly ripening raspberries; a couple of times mom gave me a penny for every 10 beetles I caught. It was relaxing, gratifying work, and I thought the couple of pennies were a bonus.

Often I played alone. I did not know loneliness.

I tasted everything that grew. I'm not sure why. It was a way of knowing things. To this day, when I see local flora -- mountain laurel bud, elm twig, maple leaf, even acorn -- I can recall its taste. I'm sure I ate my scrawny weight in timothy stems, the tender part that hides in a sheath and slips out with gentle but firm pulling.

I would take fist-sized chunks of basalt or granite and pound quartz pebbles until they broke. "Fresh" quartz smells like gunpowder (just like the "caps" you could pop with a rock; remember those? Caps came in those long red strands of paper and made such a nice snap of a sound). I inhaled the quartz smell deeply. I loved to see the clean crystals that appeared in freshly broken quartz, but mostly it was the smell that I was after. I ran my own little quarry at the side of the driveway. In the fall, sitting in the same spot, I took the same fist-sized rocks and broke into the hickory nuts that were scattered on the raggedy lawn. They were sweet and buttery, and the meat came in the tiniest morsels that ensured their savoring. To this day, I will pull the car over for a good pile of hickory nuts.

I've carried an immunity to boredom all my life. I've even seen boredom as something of a character flaw. The kids will recall that I would not allow the words boring, bored, boredom. The concept of boredom pains and offends me.

And yet now, to my horror, I think I am feeling bored. And boring, too, which is worse. They must go hand in hand, these two things.

Am I bored (and boring) simply because I lack energy? All the little projects I might under other circumstances be doing -- from removing winter's windfall in the yard to putting away the scarves and mittens -- I don't have the energy for. I am disoriented by this unfamiliar feeling. Is this boredom?

I am just slogging through chemo now; it is uncomfortable yet undramatic. It just goes on and on. Bone pain, weakness, headache, numbness, near total lack of appetite, blah blah blah. Even new little symptoms are more tedious than alarming. Incremental damage to my nails appears like tree rings with each treatment. My nails are lifting off in some places, and my attitude is sheer ennui: "really? we're going to do this?"

I laugh less readily these days. And I make others laugh less. You can feel it in the blog, too. I know. I know! 

Where is my natural and joyous capacity for being busy doing nothing? Where is the self that was blissfully ignorant of boredom? Where is my sense of humor? I miss that most of all.

Insert witty ending here.