January 8, 2019

We were doing so well. Outside my window, the green grass was completely visible, though the ground was wet from rain, and brown leaves still littered the neighbor’s lawn. It looked like autumn instead of winter—until this past Sunday, when it began to snow. The roads that had been clear as of Monday morning are covered again with a fresh dusting this morning. The car needs to be cleaned off again, but since we’re not planning on going out today, it’ll stay that way unless the sun helps. According to the forecast, we’re in for some snow squalls later today. There kind of fun to watch, in a way. Look out the window, blue skies and sun. Blink, and it looks like a blizzard out there. Blink again, back to blue skies and sun. But too many of those blizzard-looking moments can give an accumulation of “pollen”, so we’ll see.

I’m not necessarily a person who believes in gender-assigned roles for most activities in life. Both male and female can cook and check the oil in the car, change tires and do the laundry. But for me, in this house? Cleaning off the car, taking the garbage to the curb, dealing with the leaves and putting the laundry into the machines—those are David’s jobs these days. I won’t tell you it’s because he’s a man. I’ll tell you it’s because he’s more sure-footed than I am.

The truth is I need my cane to walk anywhere outside—and some days I need it right here inside my house. I can go up and down stairs, if I’m careful and don’t attempt the feat too many times in one day. Before I needed the damn cane every day, it was me, more often than not who would cut the grass, and do the gardening. I had no problem raking and bagging leaves, either. And of course, when I worked outside the home, I cleaned off my own car. Believe it or not, I miss doing those jobs. Well, maybe not cleaning off the car. I loved being outside and active in every season, though the fall was especially good—those days when there would be a promise of winter in the air, and you could feel your cheeks reacting to that chill. The slight breeze on those days would bring fresh, clean air, and it felt as if the world was remaking itself.

Some days—usually in the spring and early summer—the urge to sit outside overcomes my common sense and I do just that. I know that even if I cover myself with a blanket, I’ll be hurting later that day. Any kind of breeze on my legs, even a warmish one, will often penetrate my blanket and result in pain. Some days, that doesn’t matter. I grab at the chance to sit and enjoy the outside, perfectly willing to pay the price of pain at the end of the day for the priviledge.

Have you gotten used to writing “2020” yet? At least if you do most of your writing on a computer, it’s a simple matter to correct your “2019s” and no one ever need know that it took you most of the month to get used to writing the new year. Not like in the “olden days” when you needed to either correct the date on the check or just tear it up and write a new one.

There are events happening in this world that are completely outside of my—and your—control. A lot of things are, come to that. I find myself a hostage to the stupidity of my fellow humans, and I don’t like it, not one bit. I believe that in the years to come, historians will look back on this era as a time when a lot of people suffered from an overdose of stress. It was a good time, they will say, for those wishing to pursue careers as psychologists or psychiatrists. A profitable era for the anti-depressant industry, too. In fact, I predict there will be many books written about the psychoses of this age. I suppose one can take comfort that more will be learned about the human condition as a result of all the B.S. being flung around by so many people these days.

I know that human society has endured other periods of uncertainty, of angst and unrest as the winds of change blew in a direction most sane people would have avoided at all costs if they could. Times when uncertainty was a constant, and people didn’t know what to believe, or which way to turn. I know from reading history that there were times when despair seemed almost contagious, and there was a real fear that the world, as it was known in those days, was coming to an end.

And yes, in a sense, that’s what change is all about. But golly gee willikers, if you believe in the survival of the fittest, wouldn’t you expect the more pathetic examples of the species “homo sapiens” to have petered out by now? I mean, seriously. If our ability to think and our possession of a soul are what separates us from the “lower life forms” on this planet, then certainly the lack of evolution in those two areas would guarantee that those strains would die out. Where is Mother Nature when we really need her?

But then I am reminded that during the most horrific moments of the Blitz, the rats of London thrived. And scientists have long held—or so I’ve heard—that after the most devastating bomb explodes in an urban area, and all human life is wiped out?

The cockroaches will still remain.

Love,
Morgan
http://www.morganashbury.com
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