Unstructured Time on the Road from the Old to the New

I moved, recently. My new neighborhood is built around what used to be a golf course. The area still bears the marks of people playing through: street signs marking golf cart crossings, long vistas down shaggy fairways. The golfers are gone now, and the course itself is in disrepair: the asphalt golf cart paths crumbling and pitted, the sand traps sprouting in tall grass, the wooden bridges splintering and probably unsafe.

The clubhouse is not far from my new home. It looked over the green from a hillside, its screened porch no doubt hosting the people who reviewed the grill online. Now, the windows are broken and the building is empty, overgrown with Virginia creeper, its five-leaved stems climbing the doorframes and hanging over the gutters.

It has forgotten what it used to be. It does not know what it is becoming.

Six months into the coronavirus pandemic, I often cannot remember what day it is. The daily rhythms that knew the difference between Monday and Thursday have broken down and fallen away. There is no need to trim the fairways or weed the sand traps on an unused golf course; there is no need to dress neatly or look presentable when there is nowhere to go, no one to see you, and a limited selection of tasks to do. As a freelancer who worked from home for twenty years, I thought I would be a natural at this, but I was also raising children who had school schedules and activities to keep track of; with even those things now stripped away, I find that I had a far more structured schedule that whole time that I realized. Perhaps I was not who I thought I was after all. More of my life was extrinsically defined than I would have thought.

I walk on the golf course, sometimes in the morning; other times in the evening. There is no rhythm to it, no structure. A planned walk can be canceled by sudden rain; an unplanned walk is the whim of a moment. The dog doesn’t care; he thinks the golf course is the greatest place on earth. Sometimes we walk so far he’s footsore by the end, but he does not seem any less excited to go the next time.

Eventually, the city plans to turn the former golf course into a park. The clubhouse may or may not be part of this new phase of existence. The old structure may be of no use to the new clientele. Now, with my children mostly grown and a new career ahead of me, during this fallow in-between time where everything is a little too unkempt, a little too shaggy, it might be time to tear down the old, and make way for the new.

Like the dog, I find that it’s a walk I’m excited to take.