Month: April 2022

Life defies the spring

Spring has sputtered along this year. There was frost on the ground Thursday morning, and the weather people say we had only two or three days of average temperatures this April. The rest of the days have been 10 to 20 degrees below average.

But the leaves on the willow trees are starting to emerge, the ground is getting greener, and the daffodils are coming to life in defiance of the cold.

Life goes on, no matter the inconveniences or the challenges or the obstacles. That’s the reassuring thing about life — it always finds a way through the storm.

It’s less than two months until the first day of summer, when, soaking in gobs of Vitamin D from the sun, we will laugh about the timid spring that was afraid to come out and play, until it did. 

Rabbit hole revenge

 © Batke82 | Dreamstime.com

“Hey! What the —” the rabbit said as I tumbled onto his head.

“Sorry, bun,” I said. “How did I get here?”

“I am so over people like you,” said the rabbit, his whiskers twitching. “You fall into my hole, eyes all glazed, rude as can be, land on my head or wake up my kids, and you have the nerve to ask, ‘How did I get here?’ You know dang well how you got here. You’re just too embarrassed to say.”

These last few words were accompanied by a series of strong finger jabs to my chest. And before you try to tell me rabbits don’t have fingers, let me point out that rabbits also don’t talk.

“Honestly,” I said apologetically, “I’m as surprised as you are.”

“Then you’re not surprised at all,” the rabbit sniffed, and sniffed again. “What did you think would happen? You pick up that insidious device all the time, knowing it can send you down a rabbit hole, and you scroll and scroll until you find a perfect little rabbit hole to dive down. Well, enough is enough. Come on, guys!”

All of a sudden I was surrounded by rabbits. Drumming started to thunder out of the walls, and the rabbits began to sing along with a jangling electric guitar.

“We’re not gonna take it, no, we ain’t gonna take it, we’re not gonna take it anymore,” they sang as they swarmed over me.

I will probably post a link to this story, like always, but as I glance over at my iPhone and contemplate opening Facebook, I break out in a sweat, remembering the hordes of vengeful furry animals crawling on my chest and weighing me down, shouting Twisted Sister in my face.

My therapist says with a few years of hard work, I may be able to function normally again. But in the meantime, I can’t go out in the backyard.

There are bunnies out there.

Squalor sneaks up on me again

The piles of debris are back. I have accumulated new old records and CDs and books, and more papers have been delivered and not filed away or tossed, and so I see chaos everywhere when I sit down in my easy chair to supposedly relax and write. 

It’s not easy to see all of this. When I finish this session, I will have to take some small action against the clutter — at the very least a donation or two to the recycling bin.

I don’t mean to live in squalor. It just sneaks up on me. I mean to come back and read that book, so I set it on a pile instead of returning it to, or making room on, one of the shelves. I want to file the electric bill eventually, so I don’t toss or recycle it after I write the check. We can get a rebate for the dog’s medicine, so the receipt is under here somewhere. Enough little things like these, and pretty soon the room is not a retreat but a constant reminder of tasks undone — even the pleasant tasks like listening to the music I scored at that sale the other day.

On the other hand, this is my little corner of the universe, it’s full of stuff, and I like stuff, especially old stuff like these albums by Lobo and Jim Photoglo that I found in a $1 bin at the library, of all places. And there’s the decades-old copy of The Note-Books of Samuel Butler that I’ll be using to guide my layout of an upcoming Roger Mifflin Collection edition. And I really should dive into that Ray Bradbury tribute collection filled with stories inspired by the old master, so why not leave it where it lies? And for cryin’ out loud, will I ever hook up the microphone I bought to revive my podcast career?!

A little clutter is good for the soul, I think, and Bradbury opened his TV show with a review of his cluttered workspace.

This is not a little clutter, though. This is a lot of clutter. I set some of these papers in a pile because it was important that I review and perhaps file them, but I have gone months in some cases without doing either, and the world has gone on.

Finishing the thought, however, it would be nice to relax and close my eyes knowing that when I open them, I won’t be assailed by the sight of something undone, something that belongs somewhere else, or something urgent that I should have taken care of by now. And so, when I get up from writing this, one or more of these piles must cease to exist before I move on to the daily grind. Really. I mean it this time. Here goes …