Before I even open my front door, I can see that the sky is a flat orangey gray. The sun, although well above the horizon, winks with orange light from between the trees on the east side of the lawn. 

The weather report said that today the 2.5 micrometer small particulate matter (a fancy way of saying the tiny solid bits in the smoke from Canadian forest fires on the opposite end of the continent) would be half of what it had been earlier in the week. The air quality, it said, is acceptable. Only the sickest people should avoid exercising outdoors. Still, I trust my eyes more than I trust the report. I’ll make it a short run.

Before I start down the driveway, I take a photo of the front garden in the golden light. In early August, the swamp milkweed dominates, with its pink flowers at about my eye level. The echinacea, black-eyed Susan and prairie rockets are holding on, adding purple and yellow to the color palette. One day recently, I counted five different species of butterflies sipping from the swamp milkweed blossoms.

When I think about what I’d like to remember about this ordinary day, I know I need to remember the orange tinge to the gray sky. It makes me a global witness. What I want to remember is this garden, whole and blooming. When I look at it, the phrase “pride and joy” comes to mind. 

And immediately, I feel a pang of guilt. Isn’t “pride and joy” a phrase usually reserved for one’s children? I’m proud of my adult kids and they give me immense joy, but what makes them wonderful springs from a place so deep inside them that I don’t think it has ever been touched by my mothering. For example, they are both incredibly resilient in pursuit of their passions – video production for one, scientific research for the other. I’m proud of who they are, but they are products of their own efforts. 

This garden, on the other hand, exists because of my sweat, and when it was taken over by weeds, an unfortunate amount of tears. Plenty of my husband’s sweat has gone into it, too. When we moved a small tree, my son the scientist’s sweat was added.

When I told my father that I would write an account of one randomly-chosen day that was to serve as a time capsule of my life at this time, he told me to be sure to include a description of the view from my house and to include my feelings, because that’s what makes writing come alive.

My dad has been an avid reader his entire life, although, to the best of my knowledge, he reads only the driest history books and avoids any book with feelings. For his sake I take a photo of the lush green view before me. The last time he was here, you could see our neighbors’ pond beyond our lawn and the overgrown pasture. It was the perfect view of water, trees and sky. But trees have grown up on the side of the pond facing our house, so all that is left is the sound of frogs calling from the pond and varying shades of green to the horizon.

I try not to think of what I look like lumbering down the dirt road beyond my driveway. I’m short and dumpy with a cap of gray curls. Everything about me screams “grandma baking cookies” and my cramped stride as I plod along doesn’t suggest anything different.

I shower and eat a scrambled egg for breakfast. My son phones. While I listen, I notice that the fabric from under the chair I sat on for breakfast has fallen to the carpet in a powdery black sheet. The vacuum cleaner cord trips a mouse trap, adding extra steps to the clean-up. 

I sit down at my desk and an email tells me that the construction company we hope to hire for miscellaneous repairs needs photos. I go outside and take them. This is no quaint, ramshackle Victorian, but a mid-century-modern kit house from the 1970s that is feeling its age. It’s no wonder that I identify with it. When I return to my desk, I look at the time and am annoyed that I haven’t done any work yet today. A house is a monster that eats time, I think.

I have two things on my list for my work day: exploring some environmental justice topics, and writing a short article that I have already completed all the interviews for. 

Out of the corner of my eye, I see through the patio door in my basement office that a monarch butterfly is circling the deck post at the edge of the garden. I’m curious, so I go outside. So much for my annoyance at not working.

Butterflies are working the swamp milkweed hard. I can practically hear them slurping the nectar from deep inside the flowers. There are so many bees in the creeping thyme that at first their buzz is the only sound I hear. Then I hear a deeper hum. A hummingbird darts for the red bee balm, but takes barely a sip before another hummingbird appears and the two fly off, spiraling around each other as they rocket straight up into the sky.

The day is cool and sunny, too nice to go right back inside to the basement, so I take out a broom and dustpan sweep up the woodchips that had flooded out of the garden during a recent downpour. 

Some butterflies circle each other over the driveway, under a maple tree. It occurs to me that if gnats or flies were doing the same thing I’d call it a swarm and think it disgusting. Instead, I’m enchanted.

Later, when I go out to check the mail, I will feel the first fat, warm drops of a summer rain. A yellow tiger swallowtail butterfly will flash by me on its way from the swamp milkweed to that same maple tree with a speed I didn’t think butterflies had. It will swoop up sharply, disappearing among the maple’s branches. I’ve never seen anything like it. Is this how it will avoid being pummeled by the rain?

I finally settle into my work, and while I’m only doing online research, and my topic is depressing – pollution and climate change, and how their greatest harms fall mostly on a few –  I’m buoyed by the world’s boundlessness. Our environmental ills may be infinite, but there also seems to be an infinite number of ways people are trying to heal them. 

I’ve uncovered a dozen stories to dig into more deeply later. It’s satisfying work. I begin outlining the unwritten article. I feel the conflict between the way the story has unfolded for me and how it needs to be told for the particular publication that commissioned it. Outlining this article feels like jamming clothes into an over-stuffed dresser drawer. Nothing fits, and I don’t see an alternative to simply shoving harder.

Eventually, I feel spent. I decide a cup of hot tea and an ice cream sandwich will revive me. They do the opposite. I continue rewatching an episode from the first season of Bridgerton on my iPad long after the tea and ice cream sandwich are gone. I have wasted precious time. I can feel the dull ache of self-loathing settle in my chest as I go back downstairs to my office and to the article.

Journalists don’t get writer’s block. I’ve seen a parade of young journalists mocked at conferences for asking about a cure. “Journalists don’t need inspiration. They have deadlines.” Once, years ago, someone I thought was a friend sub-Tweeted her disdain when I confessed that typical writerly procrastination had tipped over to writer’s block. I’m afraid that’s happening now.

And, Bridgerton. If only I had been binge watching the new season of Wednesday, which feels like a slightly cooler way to fail at a day. But all that squelching and rotting flesh mean I need to be prepared to watch it, and I don’t feel prepared for anything today.

At lunch, I had pulled my salad ingredients out of a broken refrigerator that no longer stays cool enough. With five ten-pound bags of ice stuffed in the freezer and refrigerator compartments, I’ve been thinking of it as a giant cooler. It occurs to me that I have recreated an ice box. Either way, the two bags of ice in the refrigerator section have melted, and I’ll need more. Today.

As five o’clock comes and goes, my mind dwells more and more on the necessity of that ice. In the car on the way to the store, I see a dark shape on the dirt road ahead of me. It comes into focus as a small, shaggy, long-legged bear sauntering from the trees on the left of the road to the trees on the right. It is a black hole of a bear, with fur so dark, so purely black that I immediately think of that black paint made with carbon nanotubes that absorbs 99 percent of visible light. 

Thoughts like these, I believe, are a hazard of being a science journalist, but it’s probably just me. I drive down the road and think about what I’ll remember from this ordinary day: flowers, butterflies, hummingbirds and a very black bear; an orange sun and sky; and my procrastination. I’ve had days like this before and I’ll have days like this again, but knowing that I’ll remember today’s humiliations as clearly as I remember its joys stings.

I reheat leftovers for dinner. The broken refrigerator needs to be emptied and this is the best way to do it. The rest of my evening involves too much eating, too much binge re-watching Bridgerton and too much self-loathing, given that the appropriate amount of self-loathing is zero. 

At about 9:30 I notice that a nearly-full moon has risen above the trees. It is much less orange than it was two nights ago, but it is still a little orange. There are some nights I simply can’t take my eyes off the moon, and this is one of them. A coin, a wafer, a shining face, the reflection of daylight at the bottom of a well: it is all of these things. An hour later I notice it still looks horizon-swollen although it has risen far above the trees. I steal peeks through the curtains.

When midnight comes, I’m in the bathroom, brushing my teeth before bed. I see the moon one last time through an uncurtained upper bedroom window as I slide into bed. My phone dings. My daughter, the video producer, has sent a video snippet of the Beck concert she’s attending on the other side of the continent. Before I go to sleep, I’ll read part of an article in The New Yorker, but of course the calendar day is already over.

I’m glad that this is how my day has ended. Midnight has caught me in the middle of things, but the conclusion is in sight. That is exactly how I want to remember it.

Madeline Bodin is a freelance science journalist with a passion for narrative writing.