"Chopping things is my least favorite part of cooking," she said.

We stood in the kitchen as I sliced a red onion with some difficulty. All our knives are dull and we don't have a cutting board. Every time the knife would get past the resistance created by the thick middle of the onion it would chop down on our linoleum countertop making an abrupt noise that at first made me jump.

 "I like chopping things," I said. "It's so repetitive, and kind of therapeutic. You can just zone out and listen to your thoughts."
"Yea, zone out with a butchers knife in your hand," she laughed, while adding bits of sausage to the frying pan.
We were making a breakfast slop: sausages, onions, and green peppers, with eggs scrambled in. I call it a slop because once all the ingredients were added it looked like a brown lumpy mush. As we cooked the morning summer sun hazily light up our kitchen and we could hear cicadas humming outside our window with the breeze.

  (The sound of cicadas embodies summer in all its lackadaisical bliss: slow mornings, long walks, green trees, beach grass, refreshing breezes, warm sun, hot pavement, subway rides to the beach, watermelon juice, lightening storms, high tide, carnival rides, margaritas, sunblock smell, barbeques, fire pits, nights on the roof, meteor showers, long drives with the windows down, sand dunes, cold soups, life guard chairs and on and on and on. Summer. Season of languid, aimless, felicity.) 

Eating our breakfast we laughed at its unappetizing appearance while asserting that it tasted fine. It did.  Soon after we'd finished eating, she left for work and I sat in the kitchen, sipping coffee.

I wondered what it meant to be so content to do nothing.  Probably, I thought, it means nothing at all; or maybe it means I'm happy.