Pre-flight Bitchfest

Before brushing his lips across my cheek, he whispered, " Six am, that's when the tornado will be here. Good night."
I answered with a sigh, never taking my eyes off my mending. I knew what that meant; he wanted me to go straighten up the basement before I headed off to the billowing surrealism beneath my patchwork quilt. The rest of my sewing would have to wait, so would my fatigue.
I had paid two bits for a 1908 copy of Cicero at a spontaneous farm sale stop before our trip and it patiently awaited my return. A poem I had found discretely tucked between the pages, plodded along at an even gate just as it had all day. They say that if a fairy whispers a tune into your ear while you're sleeping, you'll be stuck with it all day as it runs it's endless cycle. Mischievous little mothers helpers! That must've been what happened to me last night.
This particular copy was an old text book that someone had grown very fond of, so much so that he had chosen not to return it. There were little notes stuffed here and there, poetry by Longfellow and all sorts of other scratch. It had even changed hands once, to a young lady whom admired he or his cherished contraband. My favorite selection of the long dead scientific and literary investigators, the one lingering in my mind as I pushed the needle repetitively all evening, was the following:

The heights by great men reached and kept,
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they,
While their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.

I had to smirk at my sardonic view of the timeless poetry in my present state of self pity.
Mumbling to my invisible friend,
"Yeah right,
The heights attained by schmuck's and kept,
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But their companions,
while they slept
Were toiling upward in the night,
And it ain't right I tell ya
It ain't right!"

Why can't I have a maid like all those foo-foo people with the camera-phone implants you see sipping Starbucks with Armani men?
My little friend, the invisible thingumbob that gets blamed for everything, well, she piped in, "...because you take the good with the bad. It's called balance. It's the grand design, yin and yang..."
Oh shut up! When I made that mess down there I wasn't thinking about surprise visits by any Warner Brothers cartoon characters or their namesakes. Why can't we just postpone tornado season a few more days so I can get caught up around here, go to bed NOW and sleep in, just once? ...Tomorrow would be nice.

Now I know that John wouldn't show any concern one way or the other had I decided to ignore his hint. And I know that we could've slipped down the stairs in the night without tripping over anything had we needed to. I just have this bad habit of wanting to please him no matter how bitchy it makes me.
6/5/2005 1:40 AM
word count 512