Palm Sunday

The pecan leaves are coming on full which means that soon we'll be even more shaded here than we are now. This is a good thing and the planting of pecan trees around a house makes a lot of sense. In the summer, they are fully leafed and so provide coolness, while in winter, their branches are bare, which allows the sun to warm us up. They are the first to drop their leaves in fall, the last to come out in spring.
Do we ever get actual, oh, pecans?
No. The squirrels get them all and they start when the nuts are still green and hard. They pick them, one by one with their clever little hands, take one bite and then toss them down onto the ground so that our yard is littered with them, each one a sharp, stabbing pain in Mr. Moon's side and that is when he gets out his squirrel rifle and trains the sight right between their beady eyes.

It does no good.

As I write this, there is a squirrel perched on the side of the pecan closest to the house and he is fussing, fussing, fussing, flicking his tail and trying to communicate something to me. Or to someone. I don't know. Perhaps he is merely angry that there are no nuts yet for him to plunder.
A few times a week, at least, one of the squirrels falls into the little almost-pond in the back camellia bed. I hear a splash and then a frantic scrabbling and I look to see a wet squirrel jumping up onto the fence, flicking a sodden tail and sounding very, very pissed off. They seem quite capable of not drowning but they do not seem to enjoy the experience of being in the water.
Despite what you may have seen on You Tube, squirrels do not water ski voluntarily.

I am neither charmed nor offended by the squirrels. They are what they are and they share my world and always have, as far back as I remember. They are just...there.

I think I feel like a squirrel today- an ineffectual creature with no real known purpose who is, by its very nature, a comic creature. I chatter, I flick, I grasp without thinking. I have a nest which I retreat to.

It is Sunday. Palm Sunday. I trimmed back some palm fronds yesterday from the two I planted which flank the front porch entry. Mr. Moon hates those things because they block the path.


I patiently explain that when they grow up (this could take decades) they will not. Their fronds will be up in the air, their trunks too skinny to matter. He is probably right and I have probably broken some firm rule of Feng Shui and whatever happened to Feng Shui? Are there still Feng Shui practitioners? Probably in California there are.

I don't care if the palms do block the path. I live in Florida. I want palms. No one comes to the front door anyway unless it is the occasional Jehovah's Witness and even that last one came to the kitchen door which is where almost everyone enters the house.

I keep thinking about that woman. Not in an obsessive way but I do think about her. I wish I could have taken her picture. I was so fascinated by her eye wear, those obviously expensive glasses which were more like shades with their gold accents, the way they blocked the view of her eyes. I keep thinking about how when I told her that no, I was not a Christian, my voice full of anger, she said, "Oh honey. Something horrible must have happened to you."
She was so condescending. She was so sure of her beliefs.
"First off," I told her, "I am not your honey. Secondly, something horrible has happened to everyone."

I was so angry that morning. I know I was. And I am still angry at the fact that people believe it is not only their duty but their right to come onto my property to tell me about their religion. As I have said before, if I went door-to-door to tell people about my nonbelief, they would call the cops on me. I would be hauled in. I would be given a psyche consult, and yet, it's perfectly fine and dandy for people to come to my door, to knock on it with a Bible and poorly printed pamphlets in their hands to try and convince me that something which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever is not only true and real, but necessary for my eternal salvation which is a concept I not only don't believe in, I can't even imagine why anyone else would either.
I mean- who's the crazy one here? The woman who held her arms out and looked up and said, "We KNOW He arose from the grave! We KNOW He is with us now!" or me who said, "No. You believe that. You don't know it."
She looked at me so sadly. I think she looked at me sadly. Like I said, I couldn't really see her eyes.
"But we do," she said with incredibly forced and cheerful conviction.
And you know, it's fine for her to KNOW what she knows. She can believe any damn thing she wants but she has no right to come into my yard to tell me about the incredible joy she finds in her imaginary friend. If she was looking for nuts to gather to increase her spiritual wealth or feed her spiritual hunger, she was looking in the wrong place in my yard.

I'm going to go weed in the garden. I'm going to take the time to enjoy that which is real, which is blooming, which is balm to my soul, beauty to my eyes.

I'm going to listen to the birds and to the squirrels. I'm going to watch my chickens as they peck and scratch around the outside of the garden, me on my side of the fence, they on theirs. We are companionable, even in our separate spaces as we go about our disparate tasks. I am afraid that this is how I feel most comfortable. Alone and yet not alone. Busy with a leisurely task.

Here are my baby chicks this morning. They are fine and growing. This is their job. They do it well.


I don't just believe this. I know it.
There IS a difference.

Well, happy Palm Sunday from the Church of the Batshit Crazy where we at least KNOW we are crazy, or at least I do.

Yours in companionable tasks...Ms. Moon