Yesterday I sat on the front porch for a few hours late in the afternoon. I watched my neighbours up the street working on their front garden. It looks nice. Much nicer than a decade ago when the house was in the late stages of being an inner-city student rental with a weedy front lawn and a built on vestibule that made the house look more like a crack house than a residence.
But it struck me that a lot of hobbies seem more like work than relaxation. In fact, my neighbours had to take several breaks during their workday to recoup, refresh, perhaps with a frosty refreshment. These neighbours, they are the newest ones. They bought the house after they retired and moved out of the big T.O. City people. Cashed in their million dollar home in North York and moved to a small town nearby.
But the new truck and trailer are a mistake. They are going to pull that thing all the way out west to BC this summer and then back. That seems excessive. That seems like a huge expedition that has redundancy both built into it and bolted onto it. I want to tell them, “You’re doing it wrong,” but who am I to judge. Maybe I’m doing it wrong. Retirement.
With the neighbour’s big new truck and airstream trailer, I was thinking that although I haven’t spent that much time in the USA, I noticed that Americans take their hobbies seriously. If they like fishing, they buy a boat. If they like nature, they buy an ATV. Maybe hobbies are all about toys and equipment. Maybe that is where the fun is, even with gardening. Wheelbarrow, hoe, nice gloves…
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