Prickles from the Thistles

I love the sound of rain. It’s dancing on the roof like a huge chorus of showgirls, tiny dancers, with little feet - little fairy showgirls with wings and pink and blue and yellow tutus. I imagine the gutters will be filled with glitter and fairy dust and I’ll be sweeping out the sparkly things far into summer.

She’s healing, though I dote on her endlessly and love her mercilessly – she’s surviving nonetheless. In an attempt to get back on the proverbial bike we’ve toured the local bike shop twice thus far. Her ears go back and she flinches when she sees the wheels turning - a grand set back from where she’d been. Several mountain bikers had heard the news and stopped during our daily sojourns to offer their sympathies and were kind enough to let her reacquaint with the bikes. Her breathing is sometimes labored, likely due to the damage to her sinuses, which are clearly still suffering irritation. Perhaps the blood clots are loosening. It will take some time, but she’s speeding toward recovery.

The Neighbor is gone. Can you believe I didn’t pounce like a cat on my opportunity to announce this? It’s been over a week, nearly two now, and they are gone! There are lingering remains like dog urine soaked carpet, which she doused with so much ammonia that four days later it was still dripping (not merely damp) and leaving pools on the floor beneath carpet and heavy matting. Three years of dog urine and seemingly some kind of ritual ammonia use (?!?!?) destroyed the oak floors beneath the carpet. The floor guy complained of the smell and rolled his eyes, I hope you kept her deposit.

I’ve started working on pulling the weeds, an endeavor I anticipate will take a week or two (not constant) of labor. A day’s effort got me less than a quarter of the way through the wilderness of weed and I’ve filled one and a half large yard waste buckets thus far. The prickles from the thistle are lodged in my forearms – but somehow the sting feels merely like a symptom of progress.. in a good way.

Hate With Me

The broader and deeper our capacity for love, so the breadth and depth of our capacity for hate. It’s like an expanding universe with two interdependent elements, each growing (and shrinking?) in direct proportional correlation.

An asshole on a mountain bike collided with Secret Agent Dog. He and people like him are the reason why responsible cyclist are now banned from using trails. He collided with her while riding his bike across a playing field. The incident occurred about ten feet from a posted sign saying that bikes are to be walked across the playing field. Bikes are to be walked across the field because dickheads like him don’t grasp the concept that they need to yield to people (and their pets, which ARE allowed to be off lead in this particular field.) The egotistical, materialist dickwad with his four thousand dollar mountain bike (because he needed to announce this several times – you know.. “I’m an asshole with warped priorities”) felt that while he saw the dog that the dog should have gone around him.

While blood spilled from her nose and nostrils, the jerk wants to chat about his bicycle and how wronged he felt… as he stood spitting distance from the sign instructing him to STOP and walk his bike. Everyone, hate him with me.

She moved off to the distance and sat with the patience of a saint while he complained. She waited her turn and when I finally left him chattering on about his four thousand dollar bike, she rolled on her back and cried, trying to scrunch her body into a ball and climb all fifty pounds of her into my lap. She’ll be okay. Everyone… hate with me. It’s because I love her so much that I’m able to hate this man so deeply, profoundly and fiercely.

Remember

Remember that not to be happy is not to be grateful. - Elizabeth Carter

Sweeping Pigeons

The Neighbor called to tell me that she got the apartment she applied for. She’ll be moving sometime between now and the end of the month. I’m vibrating. I’m so thrilled. She tells me tomorrow the precise date of her departure.

With the news of her imminent departure, my emotions feel like a ball rolling down a hill, gathering speed. I’m giddy and happy and like things in motion and accelerating, some of the details are becoming blurry – the details of the good and the details which outline my discontents as well. I want to hasten her exodus like sweeping pigeons from a belfry – a swoosh of something white and smelly, a few feathers floating down and poof she’s gone.

It could have, it should have been a great experience. It really held potential but never hit its mark. Instead it’s been a grand disappointment. It’s too bad.

The Saddest Proof

To be interested in the changing season is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. - George Santayana

Just yesterday (or was it the day before?) I was saying how much I love this time of year – mistaking it for springtime. I pointed at the first wildflowers – little purple buttons of color - as proof. It was barely the winter solstice and there I was prattling on about spring. Some cultures don’t have a way to express a journey away from home. You are always either home or returning home. Your first step on a long journey is your first step toward home. This is how I feel about springtime. We’re either there or returning. I suppose this makes me hopelessly in love. Ah, Springtime - in my world the earth circles the sun for Her.

Sometimes I imagine him rifling though my things, looking for some evidence of my infidelities and instead coming across mysterious things that he simply cannot understand – scrawlings that intimate something he feels just not right about – but ultimately he can’t decipher as proof of well, frankly, anything. One day his heart will break (like mine), “I gave her everything and all she wanted was the Springtime.”

I’m no writer, no poet, no artist, no seamstress – all these creative things I wish I sometimes were – I am not. Perhaps the most glaring evidence that I am not these things is the very fact that I wish to be them. Wanting to be something is the saddest proof that that thing is something you certainly and definitely are not. When we are something, we rarely wish to be it, we simply are it.

The three of us, Ed, Secret Agent Dog and I, snuggled on the day bed and brought in the New Year together. I made us all focus on how much we loved each other as the seconds counted down on the old year and unfolded on the new. We closed and opened the year loving one another intensely. Ed and I toasted with chambord spiked champagne and spoke on our hopes for ought five. Among a laundry list of rather practical things, I said I wanted to figure out, this year, what I want to be.

I know who I have been. In that regard I have a leg up on most people. I also know who I am. It’s who I want to be that’s been somewhat of an allusive beast. I think half the time I’m hiding in front of myself – being exactly who it is I want to be. If that’s true, then half the work’s done. I guess the trick is figuring out which half, eh?

I mean, we already all know that I’m leaving Ed for the Spring.