Ralph Decided To Do Nothing All Day

 

            When Ralph woke up, all snuggly in the big old quilt, lying beside Ramona, he thought it might be nice to just enjoy living, and not do anything at all that whole day. He smiled and rolled over and went back to sleep.
            The next time he woke Ramona was gone and the bed wasn’t so warm and comfortable. Nobody was in the cave but himself. But he still wanted to take a day off. He began his day off by staying in bed for a while longer. It was great, but a little uneventful. His eyes stayed open, sleep had left the cave.
            Ramona stepped back in to see if  he was awake.
            “Ralph,” she said, “I’m getting low on firewood. Do you think you could get me some more?”
            So, he rolled out of bed. He followed her out to the fire and saw that she was right. They really went through a lot of firewood.
            He fetched the big leather backpack that Ooog had made him for that one Gifting Day a couple of years ago and set out to see what he could find.
            When he got back to the Home Clearing with a nice load of broken up alder saplings and some dry stuff too, Ooog was waiting for him.
            “Ralph, will you come help me with a tree I felled earlier today? It’s a little too much for me to move alone,” said his good friend, Ooog.
            So, since it was a day of doing nothing anyhow, Ralph followed Ooog over to his place and then out into the trees a little ways. Ralph took the heavy end of the tree trunk and Ooog took the lighter end, and they carried it back to Ooog and Thaga’s back yard where he could get at it.
            Then Ralph went back to doing nothing.
            As he was sitting by the fire, incidentally while Ramona was cooking some more fish, Cherry came and took a seat beside Ralph.
            “Will you tell me a story about something that happened to you when you were a child,” she said. So, Ralph thought long and hard and decided to tell the story of when he and Uncle Bob were kids and they tried to catch lady deer to ride like a horse, how they did catch her, but when he helped Bob up on her back, Bob got bucked off, and the deer ran deeper into the forest.
            “Thank you, Da. I won’t try to ride a deer!” said Cherry thoughtfully.
            Twigg came home about then, and they all ate some trout fried in butter with some mushrooms too. While Ralph was still patting his stomach and feeling really great, Twigg said, “Dad, I’m trying to get a living tree to grow kind of in a circle and I wondered if you would help me bend it and make it stay?”
            Well, since he wasn’t doing anything, he followed Twigg out near the meadow, just at the edge where leafy trees grow. There was a young birch there with a shiny white trunk. It was quite a young tree with a trunk of maybe 6 inches in diameter.
            Ralph kind of crooned to it, until it felt willing and they shaped it around into almost a circle.
            “That should look really cool when it grows up a little in that shape,” said Ralph to his boy. “Anyone who sees it will be very impressed and even mystified,” he said too.
            It was getting dark about then, since it was early November, so they walked back to Ramona and Cherry and the animals at the fire.
            When Ralph took his seat again, Blue came up to him and went to sleep with her white muzzle on his feet as he sat there.
            Bob and Berry, the puma brothers, came near the fire and crouched down in its heat and light and smiled sleepily.
            Ralph patted all of their heads and scratched behind three sets of ears.
            Ramona sat down there beside him. She leaned on his shoulder and yawned.
            “I’ll get something together for dinner pretty quick,” she said. “It’s nice just to sit here for a while.”
            Ralph looked around at everyone and thought what a great day it had been, a day of doing nothing but enjoying himself.
            Then he put his arm around Ramona, while she did nothing for a bit, and in his heart he blessed them all, as was his custom.

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