rearranging the rocks at the bottom

I’m standing in the check out line six bucks in my pocket it is what’s left over from the twenty I took to leisurely peruse used books.  It’s my day off. 

I went on the 7 mile run along the river, jumped the water spilling over the banks, jumped the snake sunning in the path, finished off by jumping a few benches and boulders.  I have chicken smothered in homemade bbq sauce and garlic in the crock pot just waiting to be paired with a load of stone ground bread.  I have three killer heads of red leaf lettuce ready in the garden beside the row of baby spinach, homemade salad dressing, and a request for homemade frozen yogurt for dessert made mostly from the peaches we put away last season.  I have a 99 cent Torino’s frozen pizza in my hand.  Which one of these things doesn’t belong here?

This is duality, not as bad as Dr. Jekyll and his buddy Mr. Hyde but not much better either.  I can explain the pizza, and the books; I'm about to do something very brave, maybe even spectacular: I'm going to keep going.

Beach’s best glasses are sitting on the kitchen table repaired with a thin piece of wire and a strong epoxy, all better? Keep going.  I broke my camera which I have mostly gotten over the guilt.  Keep going. My diabetes is causing a little havoc (yes, I am still aware of the pizza) with my plan to tackle a half marathon. Keep going.  I found six Jodi Picoult books but none of them were the one book club is reading. Keep going.  I can’t get the 17 yr old boy with a tattoo to come see his mother he’s too busy being big.  Keep going.  There is a little bit of Yours-Mine-&-Ours tension in the house.  Okay stop none of this is that big of a deal, nothing worthy of death by bad cheap pizza.

But it's not a cry for help in the express line.  What this really is, is a moving day. Oh look, complete with a pizza party.  Time to admit that I have not fallen into this hole I have backed myself in to it.  It's not even really a hole, I am standing on level ground but I have piled rocks around me, stone walls built from too high of expectations...And part of it is I like living under rocks. 

Today is the beginning of an opportunity to pick myself up from the bottom, kick unreasonable off the pile, & start the adventure of the slow climb out.  Time to keep going.  After all the glasses are fixed, the race isn’t lost yet, I have a stack of good books to read, the 17 yr old boy still tells me he loves me in public, and the tension will not last past frozen yogurt.

You still don’t get the pizza? Well, my mom used to make these for my sister and me when we were kids.  When I dropped Beach off at their house this morning my mom gave me 2 hoppy-taws.  The first was my sister’s, who passed away about four summers ago.  The other was my oldest daughter’s.  Somehow holding those little disks of rubber in the palm of my hand I remembered something from a life time ago.  Something about putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward. 

I suppose before I grew up too much & came out from my hiding place under these rocks I wanted to taste childhood for myself just one more time.  Time to keep going I have a lot of really reasonable shit to get done...isn't it spectacular?