How can I have a snowball effect on what appears to be one of the prettiest March days yet? There's no snow out there (thank goodness)! And still, the analogy holds.
The morning was as normal as apple pi (haha!). The chickens were all over the place, happy to be on dirt rather than on snow or ice.
All good. But at breakfast, the phone calls begin. Not for me, for Ed.
Long conversations, attempting to resolve a company problem in logistics, leading to an endless stream of phone calls. We'd made plans to go on a longer hike, but he was so wrapped up in his series of calls that I could barely convey to him that I had to dash out for one appointment or another, and could he please attend to the ice cream sandwiches coming with the groceries, because they were about to be delivered and I had to run. Yeah, yeah, bla bla bla.
One of my appointments was with an eye doc. The eye problem that emerged while I was away grew over the weeks and though I suspected I could deal with it on my own, I thought a little medicine boost might hurry the recovery along, so I went. And yes, I got some ointment or other and yes it will probably resolve matters rapidly, but in the meantime, the doc said I really should have eye cataract surgery already.
Hey! (this from me) Just last year, the doc at this very clinic said I had ways to go!
I'm telling you (this from the doc today) that you dont have ways to go and if I were you, I'd do it sooner rather than later.
So I thought about this and about the possibility of me being without glasses in about six months. I looked at my face in the car mirror, glasses tossed momentarily to the side. Horrible! The frames are everything! I had asked the eye doc why it always seems that old people had smaller eyes. Do eyes actually shrink with age? And he assured me they did not, it's just that the face sort of closes in on them.
Oh yes. I can see it. Too, my permanent frown above my nose is nicely hidden by glass frames. Shed the glasses and it's front and center. No! That cannot be the new me!
(Ed's response? Gorgeous, you can wear your frames without any glass in them.)
In thinking about this very inconsequential matter, I managed to distract myself from the world's problems for a good hour. But, between my appointments and Ed's phone calls, we had taken a big bite out of our afternoon and there was no time left for a long hike, despite Daylight Savings Time. Added to the list of the most trivial problems you could possibly imagine, was the fact that Ed had put away the groceries and so now I don't know where anything is.
Sometimes you need snowballs to get your mind off of the news of the world. And though you should never stop feeling compassion for all who are in such deep trouble right now (and that pool is large, extending way beyond the Ukraine), nonetheless, you have to also acknowledge your good fortunes, including those that lead you to have a stream of lucky days, full of trivial and inconsequential issues that have no impact on the well being of you or those you love. This is, after all, what we all wish was ours: a day without calamity. A day where hope is budding within plain sight.
Here's my tiny bud of hope, right in my own back yard:
And toward evening, at a time when I should start in on dinner, Ed, who has been hanging on the phone for hours, listening to horrible music, waiting for the IRS to pick up (they never did), turns to me and asks -- can't we go for a walk? A short one? I think we need it.
We walk just to the turtle pond and it feels grand. There is the sound and movement of birds all around us.
The pond is still partly iced over, but the path is squishy and muddy and wonderful.
The snowballs recede, the golden tones of a beautiful evening take hold.
Yes, the moon is there, over all of us.
With love...
