Lifelines

In most relationships there is a good guy and a bad guy. It sets a kind of balance. Sometimes partners will trade off who gets which role. My husband and I both want to be good guys all the time. That creates no end of trouble. Sometimes I slip into the bad guy role but it makes me resentful and angry which makes me even more of a bad guy.

It used to be that I was so good, there was no way for anyone to compete. That was before I met my husband. I’ve never met anyone as good as him.  I know that no one is all good or all bad, and that it only has to do with appearances, but that doesn’t help.

We are both looking for balance and read lots of books about Budhism, but it makes me laugh, because we are both hard-wired to strive toward goodness.That makes me kind of cranky,  to tell the truth.

My son has been helping me sift through the stacks of boxes of my mother’s stuff, mostly clothes and kitchen stuff. He has a lot of energy and is good at keeping me on track. He brought one box at a time out of the store room and had me go through the things. He set up three boxes to sort into: throw aways, give aways and keepers. He then divided the keepers into two piles: storage and immediately useful.

I put together a storage box and piled up turtlenecks, shirts and sweaters that I wanted to wear. My son is over forty, but still sometimes manages to make the word Mom into four syllables. He looked at the storage box that I asked him to put into the loft and said, “Mom, I’m going to put that box into storage and then when you die it will still be there and I’ll have to go through it.”

Next he looked at the pile of clothes that I was taking into the house to put away. “Are you going to wear your Mom’s clothes? That’s gross!” I looked down at the turtleneck and flannel shirt that I was wearing. “I’m wearing her clothes now. It’s not weird. It might be weird if you wanted to wear her clothes though.”

I can’t imagine doing a job this hard without him. We are blessed with our children. I know my mother felt the same way. I’m grateful for the gift of laughter that she left us with.

This morning I’ve had two cups of tea, which is my habit. I love tea, and drink it all day long, but those first two cups are the ones that get me going and stimulate my mind. It is foggy again on the Mendocino Coast, but I have high hopes that the sun will break through today.

Yesterday evening I realized that I have to accept the harsh reality that I have to cut back the growth in my yard. I’m a great believer in permaculture, and I seldom weed. I also seldom cut anything back. Last winter I realized that the blackberries were out of control and asked my husband to dig them up. He never got around to it, and now I don’t want to cut them back until we have picked all the fabulous blackberries that are developing on them. I will have lots of blackberries to use in smoothies through the winter and will be lucky if the vines don’t eat my house.

There are a lot of other things that I can cut back though and I’m looking forward to the exercise and the change. We have mountain lions where we live and I was reading recently that they use ambush as a means to catch their prey. Our yard is a perfect spot for a mountain lion ambush. I guess I’d better get to it soon. We have a huge cherry tree that probably measures about thirty feet at it’s widest part, and underneath it the thimbleberries have taken over, creating dense undergrowth. The chickens have done their best to trample the thimbleberries to no avail, and now I imagine a mountain lion hiding in there whenever I go into the yard. I think I’ll start there.

Time for a smoothie and another cup of tea. After that I will let the chickens out and attack the yard with some strong clippers.