Posts Tagged ‘looking for positive’
Admittedly Isolated
I’m home alone with the animals again this weekend and contemplating the incredible peacefulness and beauty that I enjoy the luxury of experiencing here every day. This morning the horses radiated peacefulness under a foggy wet blanket of sound-dampening air. It was Delilah who disrupted things every so often with her random barks of alarm over imagined threats that really don’t deserve to be barked at from my perspective.
As I methodically made my way around the paddocks to scoop up recent manure piles, my mind meandered through so many trials and tribulations that we aren’t facing.
Our country has not been invaded and bombed by a bordering nation that was pretending to be doing our people a favor. Our region has yet to be torched by wildfires or swamped by unprecedented flash flooding. Extremist politicians haven’t maliciously trafficked hapless immigrants to our doorstep. We are not experiencing a shortage of food or potable water. We are not struggling with the debilitations of long-COVID infection.
The much more benign burdens directly impacting me this day include two issues that aren’t happening as swiftly as I wish. I’m wondering if the technician who will splice our fiber optic cable at the base of the utility pole across the street from our driveway works on Saturdays. Nobody showed up by the end of the day yesterday even though the cable to our house was buried last Tuesday.
I’m also anxious to receive a promised bid from our favorite excavating business regarding the landscaping of the slopes on either side of our new driveway. We’ve decided the job is too big to accomplish on our own and will require a truckload of dirt they can provide. It’s been a week since he was here to discuss the issues.
It’s pretty easy for me to preach about having a positive attitude about how great it is to be alive when I reside in a sanctuary of natural beauty and affluent comforts. I am sensitive about boasting too assertively from our admittedly isolated circumstances in the world, but my perspective is coming from having successfully treated a depression that shadowed much of my earlier life.
Our daughter is enduring the stress of knowing a vulnerable adult who walked out of her music school before his father did and has now been missing for days. Our hearts ache for those who are suffering.
I walk through our woods to a soundtrack of calling birds and water droplets coming down from wet tree leaves, the autumn aromas of fallen leaves just beginning to become noticeable. The horses huff a big sigh as I show up to clean the area beneath the overhang and serve up their pans of feed.
What can I do but send the love I experience out into the universe to flow toward all who face difficulties that I struggle to fathom, recognizing the privilege of my isolation.
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Just Yucky
Overall, yesterday rates a solid “Yuck” on the scale of pleasurable days. Most notable of our multiple grievances was the weather. My least favorite condition during our snow season is rain, and that is what we received in the middle of the day. After that, the temperature drops enough to turn the precipitation to snowflakes, but then also locks the wetness on the ground into ice.
It’s a hassle to plow and shovel and a hazard to walk and drive on. Seriously yucky.
I had hoped to avoid the great outdoors for the afternoon and enjoy college football on tv, but the Minnesota team I root for was soundly defeated by rival Wisconsin. Far from any joy to be had there, but plenty of yuck.
How could the night end any worse?
How about sprawled out upside down under the kitchen sink trying to dismantle old fittings in search of the once intermittent small leak under the faucet that picked yesterday evening to reveal itself as not very intermittent any more.
Two things I discovered: It was not clear at all which point on the fixture was leaking and the rarely-used shutoff valve on the cold water line didn’t seal all that well. Drip. Drip. Drip.
We decided to solve the first problem by simply replacing the whole works with a new faucet. That means this morning we have no water in the kitchen and I need to venture out in the winter storm to pick up the replacement. That’s a little yucky, but with a potential solution making it worth the risk.
Today offers one other bright spot for us. It is the last day of the deer hunting season! We can stop making Delilah wear the extra blaze orange harness that she glumly tolerates.
Tomorrow is going to be even better. Sunshine is forecast to replace the stormy sky. I’m hoping we’ll have water in the kitchen sink again, too.
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Relative Something 