No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
(When toilets leak)
Doug is not, has never been, a defiant person (he hates being told what to do but who doesn’t?) I am all hell-fire raise the holy rafters I’m mad now. No water ever slides off this duck’s back.
Yesterday a bee stung the top of my foot. I was wearing sandals, protected at least from stepping on someone (they like the clover). This morning it’s angry, swollen, painful.
Yesterday I braved the 8 million degree kitchen to finally make a sandwich. On the way out of the inferno, half falls off the plate, the bagel comes apart on the particle board, lettuce and mayo and
turkey (I ate it anyway) to be cleaned from what’s already trying to be cleaned. It’s funny now. I was hungry. I wasn’t amused (Doug watches me, silent, throughout my string of expletives). We’d just
come in from trimming a neighbor’s bushes. No good deed goes unpunished. I always looked at Doug quizzically when he said this but now I get it.
The tiny tiny rabbit who lives under our neighbor’s porch was eating on their crabgrass (hooray! Yank out the roots!) I stood quite close, quiet, content in a rough afternoon and the neighbor two doors down says, “Why couldn’t you just grab it and take it in the house?” “Um, because it’s *wild.* “Maybe it doesn’t want to be,” she says. “I don’t know. Maybe you can ask it.” I like animals. People, well, they irk me. Let’s put this butterfly in a jar so we can watch it up close (so we can watch it die). We think we are entitled to impose our wishes on nature (look where that’s gotten us).
Yesterday I read the Dalai Lama was asked about suffering and he said “You put your face to the wind and you weather your particular storm,” and it made me weep, and writing it made me weep again. You learn and you go on. Yesterday I was hot and agitated and fed up. Today the sun rises, the birds serenade and the day is what I make it. Oh, the quote wasn’t about suffering. It was about acceptance.
LBM 7/17/2022
