Paper Bag Full Of Assumptions

It's Friday and I'm still alive. It's been a strange week for me, being half-ill, half not. I feel as if I've had "Flu-Lite" which is far better than Flu For Real, but it's still been disconcerting and I don't know how to be sick.

I still don't feel quite great, but did take a walk this morning, a little slower than usual (but I was still passing young, strong men and that is the truth) and I saw something that might have been a fox, running through tall grass, or might have been a cardinal, flying straight through, and isn't that the way? We think our eyes are so honest and so truthful and maybe they are but the trouble begins when the brain kicks in to interpret what it is the eyes are reporting and I have learned in my years never to trust my eyes completely. The other night at dusk, I saw what I thought was a chicken in my back yard, shuffling around on the ground, until suddenly it took off with great whooshing wings to fly to the top of the Chinaberry tree and I realized it was an owl, which is a completely different sort of fowl indeed.

But my eyes saw large-bird-on-ground and my brain made the most reasonable assumption, which was that I was looking at a chicken and there you have it.

We should not make assumptions.

My daughter assumed this morning that when she went into the bathroom at 5:45 a.m. to get ready for work that she would be alone in there but she was wrong. There was a baby bat and she freaked out, as would I, and her daddy had to get it out. The bat assumed that when he fell out of the chimney he would know where he was and what he was doing but he was wrong about that, too.

I am sighing, assuming that since there was one lost baby bat in the house, I will soon be finding more. I hope I am wrong.

When I started this blog, I assumed that no one would read it. This was based on the fact that no one seemed to be interested in most of the stuff I wrote and sent out for possible publication but I was wrong. Some people have read it. My (totally accurate, I assume) hit counter turned over to the 10,000 mark yesterday and I am amazed, even if half those hits came from this computer.

Of course the hottest new blogger in the world (I assume), Black Hockey Jesus, has gotten ten thousand hits in his first thirty days- he told us! so my pitiful ten thousand in a year is pretty pathetic, but you know what? I don't care. Ten thousand is ten thousand whether it takes you fifteen minutes (Dooce, I'm sure), or a month, or a year. Or ten years! Whatever!

I'm more than blown away.

I also assumed, when I started blogging, that I'd run out of things to talk about, which has proved to be untrue as well. It would seem that I have more things to say than I could possibly have imagined. Of course, most of them are trite or hardly worth saying and definitely not really worth reading, but the joy I get in saying them is worth it all to me.

Or maybe it's just an addiction and I just think it's a joy, but that's okay too.
It's keeping me out of the pool halls and the local psyche ward and for that I am grateful.

My daughter, Ms. Maybelle, has posted her first blog and I do not assume, I KNOW, that she is going to swiftly garner a large reading audience because this girl is good. She is springing forth, fully formed, as a writer because in all probability she has written more words in her life than I have because she has been journaling constantly and faithfully since she was a tiny girl, her pencil fisted in her hand, filling up one notebook after another (where do you KEEP all those journals, May?) with her words. Her blog site is called Roll Up The Rugs and I advise you to go there and dance on the bare floor with her. You won't regret it.

Of course my son passed me the crack pipe when he got me started in blogging. We are writers, all of us, in that we are compelled to write and then compelled to share it.

The picture above is of a summer plox blooming in my office yard. It is the daughter of a seedling I brought with me from my old yard and that was given to me by my then neighbor. Plants like this phlox are so adaptive and so prolific that they beg to be passed around and so it is with writers and their words which is why we are all adapting to this blog thing so beautifully. We're like the phlox on good days, or perhaps on bad days like the armadillos that got loose from their cages in the traveling circus and are now to be found on every road in the south, flattened and oozing or perhaps lying with all four little paws stretching straight up into the sky.

And on the good phlox days I can blog so prettily and tie everything up in pretty paper and finish it off with a bow but on the bad armadillo days I just hand you a paper bag full of stuff and say here, go through this, if there's anything you can use, take it, throw the rest out.

And that's me today with paper bag in hand, feeling guilty because I came to the party without wrapping my present but here's my crumpled up bag. I think Ms. Maybelle's blog might fit you and I'm pretty sure Downtown Guy has something to say that you can use.
Throw the rest out.

And try not to step on the armadillo. Do not assume he is dead. He may be only seriously napping.