I stopped off at the post office and upon approaching the counter, immediately noticed a steady sound of chirping and twittering and singing. It’s a lovely afternoon so I thought the sounds came through an open window. The clerk looked up at me and said, ‘The chickens are getting to me today’. I asked ‘What?’ She repeated, ‘The chickens are getting to me…all the noise. ‘It’s been a long afternoon!’

I chose…actively chose to continue this conversation by remaining in front of her. I put my package down. ‘Don’t you hear that?’ She looked at me. ‘Yes, I do’. I moved the package toward her. She realized I was searching for an explanation. ‘Since we’re in a rural area we get chickens and birds delivered every day for some of the farms…and turkeys, we get turkeys’.

(Why not? I thought in silence.)

‘Sometimes I turn on music and it drowns it out…but it just did not work today’.

‘Well’ I offered, ‘you could start boiling soup back there and that would make them nervous…shake things up a bit, settle them down…and they might be quieter’. I laughed. She looked fairly unhappy and said, ‘Oh, poor things’.

(In my head I thought…’Well, the chickens and turkeys aren’t getting to me at my job…or are they?)

I thought it was funny. She didn’t.

Birds and chickens and turkeys…what next? I fulfilled my postal obligations and left…definitely time to go home…

Best quote of the day: ‘Miss, I want to go home because I want to eat cereal!’

Let it be so…

My sister gave me an excellent quote, late in the evening.

These words are perfection.

I need to hear these words, absorb these words, make these words my own.

‘Every dead body lying at the top of Mount Everest was once a highly motivated person…so maybe calm down a bit…’

Perfection…

He says to me, ‘I have covered myself with witchcraft!’ Pause. I ask, ‘What?’ He responds, ‘You know…witchcraft for all the bug bites!’ Pause.

‘Do you mean witch hazel?’ ‘Yes! That’s it!’ he responds with great enthusiasm.

For a brief moment, I envisioned this entire next school year running on a completely different track…

She kept reading and reading. It was the most sacred of escapes; an unquenchable stream of truth and beauty and human struggle to bring things back into balance. She turned pages and knew once again, there was nothing new in the human experience.

Every emotion she felt had been at one time felt by someone else in different rooms under different skies.

She calmed down, gathered her thoughts, lifted up the rich burden of life, hoisting it full bellied onto her shoulder and determined to go on…

Presenting the non-edible shopping run…mouthwash, toilet paper, laundry detergent, fabric softener, dish soap, windshield washer fluid…

Profoundly boring…

It is the loneliness of plans incomplete and the irritation of a hurried and vague day…but the grounding of the simple things…the run for groceries and gas, the quick dinner and the dodging of rain drops…

The smaller things grant life…

She turned the card over in her hand, white and thick with a computer generated swirly font. Nothing much. ‘Hmmm…couldn’t write it out by hand, it seems’, she murmured. She opened it up, scanned it quickly, reading a rather vague message about celebrating anniversaries and such…the nuances of the marriage, married life and the passing of years and so forth.

She folded it over and placed it in her lap. She leaned back in the chair, resting her head against the cushion. Indistinct notes of liquid jazz echoed from somewhere on this slow summer morning and she could not identify the tune…just that steady stream of a well worn song pulling one through the experience…a thousand late night dinners and clinking glasses…July twilight on Park Avenue. It had all been done before, but comfortable pleasure of it came from knowing just that. ‘Don’t get around much anymore’…the notes faded as someone closed a window.

She returned to the card dilemma. ‘I don’t like the woman. Never did’. She said the words out loud and it startled her. The woman had not done anything to her. She was simply there. Her husband, on the other hand was opinionated, controlling…gave off an air of arrogance. That was something else. But the woman hadn’t really done anything…other than be attached to him. Ah…the attachment was the problem.

A mourning dove cooed and disappeared into thick green leaves. The porch was starting to heat up. She had made her decision. She stood up and went back into the house, tossing the card in the kitchen trash bin. That card was not going in the scrapbook…

If one…more…cheap…plastic…clickity…clackity…rin-tin-tin…wormwood and blather…made in China…pencil sharpener drops off a desk and bounces onto the floor so that it splits open and the top part goes one way and the bottom part rolls another way…

I’m going to…

Witnessed today during a fire drill…as we stood along the sidewalk and I looked into a parked car…behold, a dirty ash tray heaped to the sky with old cigarette butts…resting quietly right next to the asthma pump.

Similar to reading the Weight Watcher’s cookbook while eating a bag of salted chips…methinks.