“Wish I was more than one, one for work and one for fun; one to go and one to stay, little darlin’ I’m goin’ away,” – Steve Forbert

Rays of sunlight penetrated the dusty glass of the back window of the garage. The filtered light illuminated an even dustier windowsill before it painted a distorted, window-shaped rectangle on the cement floor. It was a bitterly cold day outside, and the light coming in through the window brought not only a welcomed brightness, but also a perception of warmth that may or may not have been present.

The light bathed the interior of the garage, sending the building’s cold and dark shadows to the corners. From where I stood, I could recognize items from a summer seemingly long-ago dead and gone. Sections of a wooden, purple martin apartment-style birdhouse sat on the garage floor, while limbing saws and blades hung from a peg board.

However, the thing that most interested me was my wooden rocking chair, painted blue, that in times without snow on the ground sits in front of our house facing the county road. Resting in the chair to enjoy its slow rhythmic back-and-forth, while sipping on a cold drink and watching the scene, is something I enjoy greatly. It’s something I never get to do often enough.

It seems like I am always rushing somewhere to do something far less enjoyable when I spot the old rocking chair in my rearview mirror as I back my Jeep out of the garage. The chair also shows up in the beam of my headlights when I return home after dark, too late again to sit in the chair to rock. I know it might sound strange, but some of my favorite times have been spent sitting in that chair, watching the traffic pass by or talking with friends or family.

Rocking in that chair reminds me of when I was a kid and sat on a swing with my dad at my aunt’s house watching the traffic go by on the street, counting the cars. A week or two ago, my wife sent me a picture from a few years ago that showed me in my rocking chair and my young granddaughter, Evelyn, sitting in a duplicate blue chair positioned next to mine. I remember that it was a warm day. We were taking one last rock and a few pictures before that part of the family was ready to head to the airport to catch a flight back home to their state so many miles away.

On a much hotter day, a friend and I sat in the chairs talking for a couple of hours, after returning from an afternoon trip to a historic railroad trestle that had been erected decades ago over a quiet, black river in an old northern forest. I’ve sat there with my brother too, him puffing on a short and thin cigar, and me sipping on a diet Dr Pepper.

I’ve also sat there alone on plenty of occasions.

Among the best of those times have been when the sun was going down, painting pastel designs in the sky above the trees, or listening to thunderstorms moving in from the west or rocking slowly on bug-free autumn evenings, the trees ablaze with red, yellow and orange leaves. I’ve also sat in my chair plenty of times in the darkness – times with the cars on the county road gone home long ago.

I push my feet against the cement driveway to move the chair back and forth. I listen for the peeping and croaking frogs, hooting owls and yipping coyotes who bring their songs for me to hear. I also enjoy the stars, their ancient constellations appearing above me as old friends I’ve always known.

Sometimes, I see interesting things I wouldn’t have expected, like a red fox trotting down the road, visible only as he passes briefly through a streetlight’s glow. I’ve also watched groups of deer crossing the road or marching down it, their hooves making clicking sounds as they strolled or trotted over the blacktop.

When I was growing up, we had one outdoor chair that rocked. It was part of a set of four metal lawn chairs with rounded backs. They originally had white armrests and legs, and I think the seat and backs were green. I think those chairs came to us from my dad’s parents’ house across town.

Once they got rusty as years passed, my mom sanded away the flaking old paint and applied new coats of yellow from some paint leftover from the kitchen remodel back in the late 1960s-early 1970s. I don’t think that yellow paint was for outdoor use but in those days, kids didn’t tell their parents things like that. In our front porch, which was attached to the house and enclosed with screen and glass windows, we had a glider that every member of the family used.

In the hot summertime, with the west side windows covered with a bamboo-type blind, and the front windows open to the street, the glider provided a cool place to lie down. The would-be couch slid silently back and forth, providing a comfortable place to listen to the radio, read a book or just relax.

My dad would listen to baseball games out there as he sipped a cold beer. More than once, we slept on the porch overnight in summer to take advantage of the relative coolness out there. Sometime after my parents got divorced and I graduated high school and moved out of state, my dad moved the glider outside to the back yard. I don’t really recall sitting on it much after that, if at all.

He probably liked sitting there while his little schnauzer ran around the backyard. He was fond of smoking Muriel Coronello cigars. They were individually wrapped in plastic and were sold in a brown box with a flip-up lid. When his dog died, he buried him out in the backyard next to the glider.

One fall, we moved the rocking chairs onto a big matt of autumn leaves that had fallen from our front yard maples. The chairs and leaves combined to produce a nice fall backdrop for some family photos I took. Later, one of my stepdaughters would suggest I didn’t know how to take good photographs because she had lipstick on the bottom of one of her teeth in the pictures.

Breaks can be tough to come by, whether you’re 16 or 73. I’ve also sat in my rocking chair with great anticipation, waiting for my fishing buddy to come to pick me up to go on another fishing adventure. With the sun on the rise on a cool morning, I sat there with my waders on, my fishing pole resting against the arm of the chair, my fishing bag sitting on the ground beside me.

These days, time seems to be pressing down on me through every waking hour – always more to get done, more I want to do, time seems to be evaporating and moving faster than it ever has. I have recently begun to understand that many of the things I have accumulated for use at some point in the future may never be used if I don’t use them soon.

My little blue wooden rocking chair is not unused, but it has not been used as much as I’d like it to be. The same may be said for my camping gear, my fishing tackle and even some of the shirts in my bedroom closet or books on my shelves.

Gray skies, especially in winter, can keep me feeling tired and down, unable or unwilling to do much of anything. In those episodes, even the fear of wasting precious time or losing opportunities to do the things I love or am driven to do cannot shake me.

Down is down. Blue is blue. Black is black.

But even just a little bit of sunshine, like the bright beams coming through the garage window on this sunny Saturday afternoon, can lift me up and improve my mood and energy level exponentially. I might even regain my sense of purpose and wanderlust – revived and ready to walk, to get outside, to do, to be. Break off the cold and heavy chains of despair and gloom.

Please cut me another slice of that blueberry pie.

It will still be weeks before my birdhouse, limbing saws and my old rocking chair will find their way out of the garage and back out into the yard. But with March having arrived, winter’s rusted old bolt has squealed and turned a couple of cranks. That’s a sure sign more will follow soon delivering all of us into the dazzling light of springtime and all its blooming glory.

I know I’ll be ready. I’m ready now.

Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.