A Slog And A Trudge

It's been one of those days.
The investment woman never called but I got a lot done here. I walked and hung clothes on the line and watered plants and washed the dogs and threw away the Tic-Tacs and went through the jewelry one last time. I gave the chickens fresh water and I have picked arugula for our supper's salad. The venison and onions and carrots and potatoes and green beans are simmering away in the crock pot. The clothes are all put away. I swept the dust and dirt from my floors and I have washed the dishes more than once.  Jessie took some of Mother's things and I have thrown a few more things away and I've put the old photo albums in the library along with my own which are not many and are poorly kept and hardly labeled. I am not good at old photos. I think I just have such a strong feeling that in a generation, no one will care who these people are and if I don't want to look at pictures of myself as a baby, to see what my father looked like, why should anyone else? But perhaps my brother will. They will be here for him should he ever care to come and get them along with his childhood coin collection which for some reason I have custody of and the family Bible which was sent to me when my father died and which I'd like him to have.

It's all such wearying work.

But. On a day like today when I was not so good in my head, it is good to just trudge and to slog through it. To get rid of more things, to make the most mundane of decisions, to wash and fold and put away, to sweep up huge piles of dust and to empty trash cans, to peel carrots and swish the emerald green of arugula though clean water, to walk some miles, to untangle chains from a jewelry box, to know that tomorrow, no matter what it brings, will be a day of a little more order and a little less crap.

I am not now nor have ever been the sort of woman who can say fuck-it-all to life and lay on the couch and watch TV and this, I am sure, is something I got from my mother and I can no more deny it than I can deny that I got her sunspot-prone skinned.

And so it goes and so it will go and the chickens are shut up and the cat fed and Mr. Moon is out of town for business and I will sleep alone in our bed and think, hopefully, about times ahead of us in which we can be Mary and Glen and not specifically Mother and Father or Mer-Mer and Boppy or anything but two people who met and mated and married so long ago and who still, no matter whether the days are good or bad, remember that. Honor that. Take pleasure in that.

When I was kissing him good-bye today when he was leaving, Jessie was waiting to kiss him as well and she said, "You don't have to make out," and yet, I know it gives her peace in her soul that we linger over good-byes, just as it gives me peace in my soul to have seen her and her fella kissing outside as I talked on the phone, she wearing her grandmother's pink bed jacket over her T-shirt, tied with a ribbon around the neck that I gave her today, the one I think Mother got when she had Chuck so that she could be dressed properly when she got home from the hospital with her baby.

There is so much more I could have done today but there is so much less I could have done too. I am not saying that any of it really matters a damn but I did what I could and I am not going to give one thought to that which is left undone. There will be time, I feel certain and even if there weren't, who would care?