so yep. I give you Monday, April 24, 2006
I woke up this morning and opened the deck door. Something about the day called me to garden, something I love to do. Maybe I can get some weeding done! Pulling tangles of wild strawberry vines up from under the roses, I was bit by a spider.
"Let me explain," he said.
"Go on,"
"I've been watching you uproot plants. You can sit there and uproot a small plant, and yet you lovingly work around the larger one that you've decided to befriend. What makes you the judge of what is good?"
"I was just pulling weeds," I said.
"Ah. How do you determine which plant is the weed?"
"Well, usually the one I didn't plant. Are you through now?"
"I'm just getting started," said the spider. "This morning I had two friends. We had a nice breakfast in the undergrowth, and your large filthy hand appeared." I looked at my hand, and indeed, it was filthy.
"I watched you encounter my friend earthworm. You carefully cradled him up in your hand and moved him to safety."
Ah yes! This morning while weeding, I found a little earthworm, trying to escape the newly sunlit ground I uncovered. He slid across my palm, and I wondered, 'Do worms feel love?' As a child, I would pick them off the city sidewalks after the rain, trying to save their drowning little bodies from the afterlife. Even now, when the rains come, I pick them off my driveway, setting them in pots. My husband fishes with them, insuring me that they stay on the hook better if slid on lengthwise, hook through their little worm mouths, the sideways and again. If worms feel pain, do they also feel love? Is it better to feel neither than both? I watched him slip under the landscape timber that borders the garden.
"I remember Earthworm."
"Then I watched you encounter my friend grub worm."
Grub Worm? I didn't remember. I told him so.
"You don't remember GrubWorm because you smashed him with the flat end of your shovel."
"Oh." I did remember that.
"What makes you think you can be the judge of what is good or what is beautiful? I have never met a larger hypocrite than you! Do you take on this God Complex in every aspect of your life? GrubWorm had a sweet, juicy inner core...but based on your opinion of what was good, you disposed of his little grubby life! Hypocrite, I say! Long live your gushy spirit, Grub friend!"
And with that, I smashed him with the flat end of my shovel. (Hey, that way, they can be together, right?)
My spider bite is still sore. (Yes, there's a real spider bite. It all happened, just like that. Although walking back to the house to get some mango tea, I thought I heard a little spider voice, telling me that the spiders wre going to band together. They would hide where I least expect it! I think this voice was Steven's, ha ha...)
One of the things I've learned from Steven over the years is to shake my shoes upside down before I put them on. Spiders, he tells me. Once when he was little, he had cowboy boots. After summer one year, he went to get them out of the closet, and there was a dead rodent inside one. So not only does he shake his shoes, but he also sticks the pair he's going to wear the following day up high on a table. I don't go that far yet, but I do shake, and YES, I have shaken out a spider in the past couple months. (Steven also won't get into bed without checking the sheets & under pillows for spiders. Would you say he has a phobia?)
I was really going to talk about my weekend. My mother, trying to make a lemon meringue pie, saw her crust cracked. Irritable, she went home. Steven, thinking we were having pie, brought his sweet tooth home from office depot, and stood staring at the cracked crust. He decided he'd make scratch brownies. After working on them for twenty minutes, the last ingredient was flour. There were two recipes, side by side, and instead of using 1 cup of flour, he used 2.25. His dream of watching Kill Bill One (again) and eating late night brownines was ruined. No more sugar meant there were no more second chances.
"There's half a pear in the kitchen. If you want, I'll put some chocolate syrup on it." He didn't see any humour in what I'd said. I got a kalhua White Russian out of the fridge and sat with him, watching the hansou sword scalp Lucy Liu. Again. Hmmm.
If I ended this with "I went to the kitchen and got that pear half that the kids had left; sometimes you just have to appreciate the little things" that might sound good. But in truth, I threw it in the trash the next day, so that would be a lie. (Like the spider story is not a lie? you say? Hey, I'm even writing your dialogue in here! No, the story is not a lie, merely the dialogue. Perhaps not even that, but spiders talk much too low for me to be able to understand them.
I love you all so! Have a great morning!
Oh, and Congrats, Shannon~ Your baby is too precious.
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