that's mrs. mediocrity to you

Dust. It collects everywhere. On shelves and witches balls, in corners and my mind. It is pervasive, invasive, persuasive. It makes me want to give up, cry uncle, sing defeat.

I can’t keep up with the dust, so I’ve stopped trying. I let it sit there and ruminate on my blind eye turned elsewhere. Waiting. Dust knows we are enemies. In fact, we literally are, I am allergic.

But it is deeper than its own thin layer, dust. It is a sign of inertia. The battle of life, age, entropy.

Dust is dead. Dead space, dead air, dead cells. The opposite of life.

I watch it float through the air trapped in rays of sunshine, trying its best to look pretty. I feel it settle down around me, all the while making snide comments on my laziness. I smell its musty, fusty, dried up scent, just reeking of neglect.

Dust is illiterate, but I read the words that I draw in its layers and cringe at their implication. Clean me. Notice me. Take care.

It is not my fault, this dust, it is something that happens. We can remove it, daily, weekly, monthly, as often as there is time, but it will always return, unwanted visitor, benign blanket, ambivalent disguise.

I tackle dust, every so often, when I can’t tolerate its presence any longer. I wash and scrub and eradicate this evidence of days gone by, of life’s slow and steady passing. I make it sparkle.

We both know it is a losing battle.

But we pretend for a day, or at least an hour,

that I am victorious.

So yesterday, I let Brett, Number 4, most often known as Puddin’ Pie, outside for the first time in three days, and later, I look out the kitchen window and I see him carrying a huge bird in his tiny kitten mouth. And I thought it was a mockingbird, my mockingbird, the one that likes to tell me lots of stories, and I was oh, so not happy with Brett.

So I sent my husband a text that said, “Brett just killed the mockingbird,” and he called me and said, “No, that bird was out there when I mowed the lawn last night.” And Brett was not.

Pause. Okay….

And I was glad, oh so glad, that Brett didn’t kill it, and then, just a few minutes later, I heard the mockingbird, my mockingbird, singing his tune, and I was glad, oh so glad about that. But still, I had to wonder, who or what killed this bird, and why, knowing that we have six, yes, six! cats, did my husband just leave it out there?

Because then I couldn’t find Brett to get it away from him, and when he finally did come back, he was licking his chops, so I know, just know, that he had himself an I-have-no-idea-how-long-this-bird-has-been-dead snack.

But I can’t blame him, he’s a cat, for crying out loud. That’s his job in life. To kill birds and mice and those mice in clown’s costumes, the chipmunk. And then eat them.

And still it made me sad, because I love my birds and we have spent so much time and bird seed and bird baths and bird houses trying to attract them to our yard, and now we have these cats that I want to kill the mice and even the cute little chipmunks, but I definitely don’t want them killing birds.

But that is not the way nature works, not the way instinct works, and why did I think it would be, could be otherwise?

And then Brett, he comes inside and he climbs into my lap and he is just so stinkin’ cute and he is all cuddly, all purrs and kisses and sweet tiny meows in his funny little squeaky kitten voice. And I am in love with this kitten and his sweet cuddly kitten ways. But. I have seen, several times now, what he can do.

What he is capable of.

Food for thought, that.

she is trapped inside a month of gray…

a quote from a song that is singing my tune, in these days when the world is filled with color, and these nights when the world is filled with life, and you would think that some of it, a tiny little bit even, would rub off on me, turn me at least a slightly pastel shade of something, but no, there is only gray.

and i’m not saying that gray is bad, it’s not, i like gray, it’s just that it’s not black and it’s not white and the variations are endless and the possibilities are overwhelming, and somewhere in the exact middle of all that gray is the epicenter of the universe or at least the average, the mean, the median, of all the other days, and what does that signify, exactly?

something is shifting in the universe, every second of every minute, and most of the time you can’t tell, you don’t even notice, but every once in a while you feel that shift, that tiny alteration, in your flesh, in your bones, like the tiniest of breezes ruffling over the valleys of your face.

and what i mean is not profound, or out of reach, but life, daily life, that brings with it the endless possibilities, distracting us from the moments we are in, running fingers through our hair just long enough to make us wonder.

and if we wonder long enough, wander long enough, we always get there, the place we are supposed to be, even if we don’t know what it’s called, or how we got there, or where we will be headed next. it might be called tomorrow. or next month. or the future.

but it’s never called yesterday.

But it is late, too late and it is just me, here, with the moon and all these cats, who are usually enough but tonight, another night in a rough week, a tough week, a week of too much work, and too much conflict, and too much not enough quiet, these cats and this moon are not quite enough to soothe me.

Most of the time during a week like this, which seems like more weeks than not, lately, all I want is to be by myself, alone, to unwind, decompress, listen to silence.

But every once in a while, on a warm, windows open kind of night like tonight, a night that would be a porch night if I had a porch, I find myself wishing I had a girlfriend, a neighbor maybe, who would stop by, late and unannounced, and sit across from me at the kitchen table and drink tea, no, whiskey and lemonade because it is too warm for tea, and talk me through it, around it, over it.

And we would complain about the heat, and laugh about silly things like dresses and movies and bad hair days and old boyfriends and sappy poetry and endless hours of folding laundry. And then move on to deeper subjects, life and living, love and heartache, tragedy and mystery. We would solve all the problems of the world. And suddenly, it would be 3:00 a.m. and we would say, both at once, “I haven’t stayed up this late in years.”

But now the moment has passed and it’s no big deal, and I wasn’t really in a poor me kind of mood, it was just a little late night reminiscence brought on by this warmth, already a little too warm, reminding me of summers when I was a young girl. My mom always had girlfriends like that, although she never drank anything stronger than coffee. It was one of those moments, a possibility of perhaps… something I might be doing if I had that life.

But in reality, my reality, most of the time I like to be alone, or at least the kind of alone that is my husband sleeping in the next room. And I barely have time for the friends I have now. And tomorrow, it will be fine, I will call one of those friends, and we will laugh.

Anyway, it was just a thought, and it is late

and there’s just me, here.

Besides, I have all these cats,

and the moon, she knows my name.