anything worth doing

by Jeanne Yu

IN MY EMPTY-NESTER OFFICE, my daughter’s old bedroom, I sit through a Zoom meeting under a mobile of glow-in-the dark asteroids and stars, and my eyes wander along the postered walls—electric-type Pokémon sisters, Plusle and Minun, a black rhino storming towards me, and a big-bellied Totoro. I work on the NASA Aeronautics team; our research focuses on evolving airspace architectures to integrate more automation and new aircraft flight concepts safely. Last year, my husband and I both reduced our work week hours, so we could experiment with how retirement might feel in our last decades. We’ve each set dates to retire—many times. Last month, I announced to my team the intention to no-kidding, really retire, but I hadn’t yet gone down the path of the checkout process, which, among other paperwork, includes voiding and destroying the government passport I used for traveling abroad on government business: two holes punched in the cover and two holes in the barcode on the photo page. So after wrapping up the Zoom meeting notes on a TGI Friday afternoon, I decide that completing this simple passport “hole” task will help me take a first step. The perfect start to real retirement.

I run downstairs to scrounge up my burgundy official government passport and jam it my handheld single-hole punch. I squeeze hard and grunt for effect without much success. (Mental senior note: grip strength needs work.) Needing something with a little more umph, I dig out the heavy-duty metal three-hole punch from the cabinet and place it on my desk, insert the passport into the middle hole, push down with the full weight of my body and voila, one hole done. I shimmy the passport out. Then I punch holes two and three. I’m crushing it. But with each successive hole, I notice the passport is a little harder to extract, sticking in the hole punch because of remnants from the previous holes, but heck, I only have one hole left. I position, then punch hole four, done. I pull at the passport, but it’s stuck. The hole punch will not let go.

After a few minutes of wrestling and losing, I give the passport a couple of violent, futile tugs back and forth, but the clenched jaw of my three-hole punch is persistent. I grab my passport cover over the two first holes, lift it up, and the full weight of the three-hole-punch hangs from it, then ouch! A piercing pain jabs into my finger. I drop the punch, shake out my hand, only to find an angry tiny black fiber splinter staring back at me, halfway in and halfway out of the tip of my middle finger. The security fibers embedded in U.S. government passports to prevent counterfeiting are not only resistant to destruction but also vengeful. I go find tweezers, remove the black sliver from my middle finger, then stomp back to curse at my passport before I leave it on the carpet and walk away for the weekend.

Temperatures did rise above freezing for a short time Saturday afternoon with some snow melt, but after a cold night, I wake on Sunday to a frosty 25-degree January morning in suburban Seattle. I slip on my boots and follow my husband’s attempt at a shoveled snow path to the backyard, which has become an iced-over OSHA safety hazard for my sixty-year-old bones. It’s so cold the green grass crunches as I approach the chicken run, where I open the gate mounted between the support posts of an elevated playground platform and reach in to hang the feed off a chain on the underside of the low deck. Every morning, I duck under this deck to keep from hitting my head as I make my way over and into the coop to check for eggs and scoop chicken poop. I make a note that we need to add “rebuild a taller chicken run entrance gate” to our retirement list of to dos—just one more thing on a growing list of things we will have to come to terms with when we actually retire.

In my thirties, forties and fifties, I thought of retirement as a goal, a destination where you arrive, take your whole life in, and then sit around with the reward of having worked hard. But I’m finding that the concept of retirement is the opposite: no more great excuses to put off all those things a job kept me too busy to do, no more carrying the weight of all those years of slapped-together dinners and eat-at-my-desk-lunches on this sixty-year-old body, and instead daily decisions of what meaningful or meaningless things to do. Hello, junk drawer, hostile password multi-factor authentication takeover, forty years of photographs, retirement financial planning, cleaning the moss off the patio and sorting through packets of expired organic vegetable seeds. Now I have to live with myself. And my spouse. And the chickens.

This morning, the water in the round green plastic watering trough in the chicken run has iced over, so I bend over and twist and hammer the bottom of the tray with my bare hands to break the solid ice ring into pieces, which I fish out. Finally, a trickle of water starts to flow again, but now my fingers are numb and nearly frostbitten. I step over to the coop and use my frozen thumb to cock the latch and open the coop door.

Inside the coop, a bright infrared heat lamp glows over the indoor watering can to keep the water flowing and provide a bit of warmth for my little white Silkie hen, Daybreak. She likes to stay in on cold winter days, while Dawn, another white, and Twilight, a black Silkie, prefer to peck the frozen hard earth for bugs in vain. Opposite the door, three nest boxes are mounted a foot above the floor on the coop wall. In the middle nest box, Daybreak’s white-feathered wings fluff out and her chest feathers puff round to protect her recently laid egg. She turns her head towards me as if to beg me to close the door to keep in the heat of the 250-watt lamp furnace. There is no inside door handle to the coop, so I grasp the outside edge of the door and swing it inwards with enough momentum to set it against the door jamb. I pull my fingers out at the last moment to keep them from getting pinched, and the door swings inward faster than I expect, clunks when it hits the door frame, but then continues to close until I hear a metal-clanking rattle as the door latches and locks me in.

The upper half of the locked door is painted in a cheery bright-blue. I back up to admire both the cloudless summer sky and the roller-coaster lime green hills below that I haven’t taken notice of in nearly twenty years since my then-eleven-year-old daughter decorated the interior of our coop for her first flock of hens. My husband and I had said a dog would be a good pet, but my daughter insisted on chickens. I remember the arrival of the six fluffy peepers at the post office in a little box and the rush to finish building the coop and add the final touches. Our Ameraucana and Silkie chicks were going to be egg layers. Chickens named Princess and Sweetie are naturally not meant for consumption. We enjoyed the fresh eggs and amusing chicken antics—pacing the fence to plan their next break out of the backyard, positioning for dibs on their favorite nest box, dust bathing, scratching and pecking inches from us while we’re weeding in the garden to nab fresh bugs or wriggling worms in the turned up soil—so Paul and I kept the chicken flocks around, even after our daughter left for college and then graduate school, and now we are on our fifth or sixth generation. So much for empty nesting. Every morning, I hang out their feed and let them run in the yard. On frigid days like this, I wonder why and how many more years we’ll keep at it.

I’m sure Paul will soon notice I’ve gone missing. In the meantime, I do my business of shoveling up the chicken’s business. Then I consider the chicken hatch door. Too small. The north-facing window seems a plausible exit. I open the window, high lift my right knee, rotate my titanium hip replacement joint and side kick my leg into the open air. My crotch straddles the bottom rail while my right shoulder and torso press against the upper window sash. Now the window seems even smaller. My only hope is to Superman it out of there. My healthy hip nips that idea in the bud. I retrieve my leg back into the coop, stick my head out, and yell, “Paul! Hey, Paul!” into the quiet suburban morning. Through the sun’s reflection on the patio door, I can see my husband’s shadow moving back and forth, making breakfast, behind more-soundproof-than-I-thought windows. Daybreak eyes me curiously as I squat down to meet her eye-to-eyes, and I say, “I guess it’s just us chickens.” I pet her back and she coos. I can’t help but admire her patience and dedication to her job as she sits on that egg.

Again, I jack-in-the-box my head out and yell. All I hear in response is the whee-eet, whee-eet of the chickadees queuing up in the bushes, the chiwee, chiwee, chiwee of juncos hopping along the drive and the song sparrow’s sweet melody. The underwing orange of a Northern flicker flashes as it lands on a branch of the cherry tree, waiting for the birdfeeder I’ve yet to hang.

Time stops.

I breathe in the exhale of the seventy-year-old Douglas firs watching everything from above. The clouds slowly brighten from their dawn’s yellow, and I spot one in the sky that looks like Daybreak. The need to be somewhere to do something dissipates into something more natural that feels like just sitting on an egg.

Paul, wondering where I am and probably not wanting the breakfast burritos to get cold, finally looks out the patio door and sees me hanging half out the coop window. He slips on his shoes, opens the door, and runs out yelling, “What are you doing?”

“I’m stuck in the coop!” I draw my head back inside the window.

He swings around the back, ducks under and into the chicken run and unlatches the door. He shakes his head and reaches inside the coop, around the door frame latch jamb, and untucks a half-inch lavender cord there in the corner between the jamb and the two-by-four reinforcement stud. “Why didn’t you just pull the cord to let yourself out?” he says.

After the coop incident, an unsatisfied listlessness settles in me, and I carry it into the week. I find myself putzing around, which I rarely do until I finish my ever-growing list of job work, house demands, and life to-do’s. I don’t even have an inclination for social media or the data from the continuous glucose monitor my son-in-law gave me for Christmas—which has its own insidious way of making me want to keep checking my glucose level every ten minutes, after I eat, exercise, eat a Dilly bar (did I say that or just think it?). I quit seeking some job to be done, stop adding to the to-do list, and release my uncontrollable propensity to glorify the list itself. This frees me up just enough to consider my future a bit differently.

So I’m a career girl. Right out of college, I started an engineering job and worked as an engineer for the next forty years. The truth of it is, while I sometimes complain about job work, my work colleagues have become my community, and my job, a comfortable habit, a place to play and to solve the problems-of-the-day, satiating the engineer in me. I define myself by my work and what I create. After doing anything for that many years, way longer than Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours, you get good at it, and it seems like a waste of all those accumulated skills if you stop. I’m hanging in there because I don’t want to let the team down, because I like the momentum of a team driving towards project goals, and I have to admit I still relish that adrenaline rush when things go well. Or maybe I’m just afraid of never being able to go back when I stop. Any and all these reasons make it easier to fall into the need and habit-forming routine of email, Zooming, talking strategy, and making big project plans with the team.

Over the next week, I test the waters of life outside the coop. I make an optometrist appointment that I’d been putting off, and I take the time to ask him whether he felt sorry for the Cyclops in the Odyssey. I watch an online cooking class and use my knife skills to make little cubes of apple and hold my broccoli tree upside down to knife off the branches. I wander around a lamp store clicking lights off and on, wondering who puts these fancy-pants lamps in their houses. I take the Metro bus 255 to a Seattle poetry reading at The Nature Conservancy and use the bus ride to re-lace my shoes in a ladder pattern to give my toes more space (wiggle!), and I buy a little plaque that best describes this mental space where I have finally arrived: “Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else” – J. M. Barrie in Peter Pan. I place it in counterbalance to my life philosophy: “Anything worth doing requires work.” It’s probably time to intentionally consider what worth, work, and play I’d rather be doing for my last decades on earth.

On January 28, 2025, I, along with 2.3 million other government employees, receive an email from HR marked with a red high importance exclamation point. The subject line: “Fork in the Road.” A 2025 Presidential Executive Order directs a reformed government workforce, the impetus for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) four-pillar plan of which the first pillar is return to office. In my case, to my research center in California, two states away, with a report date of February 28, 2025. The Fork in the Road HR email culminates in an invitation: “If you choose to remain in your current position, we thank you for your renewed focus . . .” or “If you choose not to continue in your current role in the federal workforce, we thank you for your service to your country and you will be provided with a dignified, fair departure from the federal government...Upon review of the below deferred resignation letter, if you wish to resign:

1) Select “Reply” to this email.

2) Type the word “Resign” into the body of this reply email. Hit “Send”.”

It’s a process, but getting mentally unstuck over the last week has made me more comfortable leaving the coop. There are too many other things I’d rather be doing now.

My daughter points me back to the last stanza of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” to reconsider its meaning for me. I guess I’ve come to that place in a yellow wood where two roads diverge, that Fork in the Road. I once again reconsider the last stanza. Was the poem about the road I will not take at this juncture, about the road I take, or my telling of the road I choose that will determine the essence of who I will become?

I draft up my final job checklist: send draft of white paper to I, call P to thank him for the fun work I got to do, host that last architecture strategy meeting on Friday, get my government passport out of the damn hole punch, and reply to the Fork in the Road invitation.

Resign. Hit send.

Fly.

About the author:

Jeanne Yu is a writer, poet, engineer, mom, and environmentalist who lives every day in her hope for the world because of and in spite of our humanness. She completed her MFA at Pacific University in January 2023. Jeanne’s work can be found in Rattle, Grist, Breakwater Review, Paper Dragon, Bellingham Review, Intima, The Inflectionist Review, New Letters, Otter House Arts, and the Oregon Poetry Association. She has enjoyed volunteering for Northwest Review, Perugia Press, and CALYX.