Dumbass-penny pinchin'-tight ass-goat ropin'-redneck-hick-inbreds!

Some days the Tao eludes me. In the event that I am not making that connection, even remotely, which is typically the depth with which I understand the Taoist Quotes, I turn to one of many fun little books for my writing prompts. This one is from Life Lessons, by Robert C. Savage


Yesterday is gone;
Tomorrow is uncertain;
Today is here.
So use it!

Today was a beautiful day. Too Spring-like to remain indoors to perform those mundane, wearisome tasks of domestic bondage; cooking, cleaning, organizing, who needs them? I know where most of my stuff is and the stuff that I don't have a clue about? I've survived just fine not knowing where they were since I lost them, so why mess with a system that works? Let them remain in whatever dimension they've slipped into, at least for today.

A few weeks ago I dissected our abode into a workable grid for a systematic search. Some items mysteriously reappeared in places I had previously searched a dozen times, which leads me to believe I have house fairies. The remaining items on the stuff-I-think-I-still-own list that are yet unaccounted for will eventually be found accidentally, I'm sure, or will end up eulogized in one of my really bad poems.

Cleaning encompasses the whole put-things-where-they-should-be thing, which in turn means I have to find a proper place for the mischievous miscellany which is presently residing in the proper place for something else entirely different. My penchant for cataloging and categorizing, color coding and properly positioning in my pedantic microcosm is an endless shifting of nonessentials. It's my penance for those moments of haphazardly stuffing things out of site on those hurried or lackadaisical days.

As for cooking? I say "Let the dust bunnies fend for themselves!"

It's been a mild winter this year, but still cold enough to keep me in most of the time so Merlin (my dog), Freya (the feline matron of the farm) and I went for a stroll. To our dismay we happened upon a backhoe tearing down the old farm school to the North of our property. There is an upside though, to every coin. The mother of all copperheads, perhaps the biggest ever sighted by us anyways, lived in there. Maybe it'll get buried for good. I've seen pythons that size before, but never a snake of the Americana poisonous variety.

Seeing a backhoe ripping through the thick stone walls and plopping the rough hewn stones into the back of an old dump truck was a sad thing to witness. So reckless, with no respect for the toiling farmers that built it over a hundred years ago. It meant nothing to those two dirty men, it was merely salvage. Some fool thought he'd build a fireplace and thought the huge sandstone cubes would work nicely. I've got news for the jackass, it'll crumble. We tore out just such a beast from this structure years ago. It was a terrible disaster that the previous owners simply lived with. They stuffed rags in the widening cracks between the stones and the walls of the house. The heat, we were told, shouldn't have affected the outer, decorative stone. Wrong. There were many widening gaps even between the stones themselves.

Another person may have felt it was their duty to inform the men of the futility of the pending Titanic fireplace. Not me. I felt it was my duty to allow them to reap what they were sowing.The flagrant disrespect for our historical landmarks which were not yet immortalized as such by the proper collectives of chattering old women was shameful. Merlin whined to be allowed to show his disapproval in a canine tirade. Freya ducked into the thickets and peered out warily. I just turned and walked away, muttering words like, dumbass-penny-pinchin'-tight-ass-goat ropin'-redneck-hick-inbreds! Merlin gave me a psychoanalytical look and followed it up with a let-it-go grunt as he hunkered down for the walk home.

Yesterday wasn't completely gone as long as those walls stood. The occasional old-timer would stop by to see what had become of these old places. The daffodils and Iris ever faithful to the school grounds would rise and bloom each Spring and the sweet smell would mingle with the honeysuckle, forest floor and stream out back. They'd stop and smile and breath deep. Even I would swear I heard children laughing on occasion when hunting mushrooms there. This year the area is ripped asunder, the flower bulbs ground under by the heavy wheels of the backhoe.
Somehow, I don't think the literal manifestation of "So use It" was what the author meant, but what can you expect from the type of man that thinks good manners means spitting into a cup instead of onto the ground.
word count 782
2/15/2005 1:38 AM