I should know better than to try doing my taxes on a Monday. In fact, I should know better than trying to do my taxes, rake the yard, get wood, write two stories, take an interview, try to quit smoking (actually, I didn't attempt this, but it felt like it) and stop eating square meals altogether.
I should've stay right the hell in bed, but, as you all know, that is simply not an option. At least not for me. As my brother says so often, "Duponts don't retire, they seize up."
Thank you, little brother, for reassuring me that I will die standing up. Most likely I will be raking.
It was a beautiful day today, the snow is almost gone, the air smells like new earth...and thawing dog crap. Oh yeah, you know it. That first sign of spring when you crack open the window and take in a deep Glade Plug In commercial breath and suddenly your nostrils are filled with the rotten sting of composting grass with a tinge of thawed dog poop.
You know what's even better? Sweeping the 500 pounds of pine cones and pine needles off of your deck only to discover that half of that debris was actually the aforementioned dog sh*t.
Apparently they are more like humans than I thought. Too lazy to even head out to the tundra to do their business. Awesome. I was going to make the kids gather all of the pine cones in the yard and put them into buckets but my biggest fear, which will become reality, is that one of them will pick up something other than a pine cone and yours truly will have the distinct honor of washing it off with lye soap.
Rakes it is. And rubber gloves.
Just a note on the taxes, I had forgotten how impersonal filing taxes really is. There is no box in which to cut and paste your life's drama. Hard numbers is it, not how scared you are of losing the house, how your health has deteriorated into nothing, how you've been so stressed your legs tingle at night, how your marriage is broken forever.
They don't give a sh*t. And I have a feeling that the icing on this cake is going to be that we will end up owing, again.
Happy spring!
This is a darkly humorous bit about life as a rural mother and freelance writer in Western Massachusetts. Little Appalachia, if you will. The title, I feel, clearly reflects how life is coming at me like an overloaded freight train, and my own ridiculous response to it. Me VERSUS all; teenage children, people who want me to work for free, conservative government, food karma, weird menfolk. You'll either laugh, shrug your shoulders, or call DSS immediately. Happy reading.
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