A Mixed Bag

There’s a pool party going on next door in honor of tomorrow’s American birthday. Everyone in the neighborhood was invited, including me, but there are a couple of reasons why I couldn’t make it. For one thing, it’s a hundred and thirteen degrees in the shade right now and I’m allergic to furnaces. Also, I’m pretty busy right now turning into a recluse. Introverts at pool parties mix like oil and water, to coin a terrible analogy. Nobody likes swimming in stuff like that.

I don’t want to be a recluse. It seems to come with the territory though, that and loneliness. But I’ve been told I don’t have to view things that way. I can find a new story to tell as there are plenty of ways to reframe my perspective. For example, I’m learning to be my own best friend. I’m finding out who I am without Rob. I’m noticing details in the world around me and spinning them into blog posts. Stuff like that. And it gives me lots of time to eat chocolate.

That might be the reason I’m turning into a recluse. Too much chocolate.

There's still plenty of funny in my reclusive world. I just have to look a little harder for it from inside these air-conditioned walls. Today as I sat in my recliner, I read a book written by another widow about the disastrous foray she took into the world of online dating. What a nightmare. Just reading it is keeping me on the straight and narrow, except for that chocolate addiction. But she’s funny, our stories of loss are surprisingly similar, and I’ve got a bag of Dove milk chocolates sitting beside me keeping me company.

You know what’s fun about Dove chocolates besides letting them melt in your mouth? The “silky smooth promises” written inside the foil wrappers. Every couple of pages as I read the author’s struggle to fill out a profile for herself, I picked up another Dove chocolate and decided I’d never expose my soul like that online.

Oh, yeah. Well. Anyway.

“Things I could never live without,” she was asked. “My late husband,” she wrote. I loved her already. She wasn’t gonna get any dates that way, but I knew we could be friends if our paths ever crossed. “Write your own fairytale and be your own hero,” my chocolate therapist wrote. Of course. Table for one and you don’t have to share.

“What are you looking for?”  “A time machine to take me back to when my husband was alive,” she answered. You go, girl, I thought, unwrapping another blue foil with its milk chocolate treasure. “Don’t let anyone dim your light,” Dove agreed. You gotta be you. No one does it better.

It’s a pretty good read. I already knew from watching her interview that she gets a second chance at love in the end, but reading about all the frogs she had to kiss before a prince showed up is entertaining.

I stared off into space, through the sliding glass doors, and out to the pasture beyond. Dan and Katy’s irrigation came in last night and the grass in my front yard and theirs plus everything in the back is a collection of ponds as gallons of water absorb into the thirsty ground. Judging from the arrival of feathered friends, the birds eye view from above must resemble Minnesota, the land of ten thousand lakes.

Earlier, glancing out my bedroom window, I counted at least forty sparrows having their own pool party in a large puddle near the kids’ trampoline in my daughter’s backyard. Now, I spotted one of the neighbor’s white chickens at the far end of Katy’s pasture near the old chicken coop. She was having the time of her life. It was like she’d found the holy grail of bugs and worms out there, rescuing them from floodwaters where it appeared they were doing their best not to drown.

They weren’t drowning. There was no time. In front of our feathered opportunist, a feast of celestial proportions was laid out for her, and she was getting her fill. Also, I suspect she’s an introvert, too, and was escaping all the splashing across the fence in her own yard.

I went into the office and sat at my desk. In the front yard outside my huge window, a snail vine flourishes against the gate beside my back wall, its little purple flowers balanced on wandering tendrils backlit by healthy green leaves. Jutting up from the ground in the middle of its flowering expanse is a tall weed I would have pulled out by now if not for my fear of furnace-like heat and an allergy to wasps. That weed ruins my view and my perspective. But standing tall like it’s doing today, I’ve seen a steady flight of tiny little finches or starlings or something the size of hummingbirds, but without the humming, land delicately on its stalk, pausing mid-flight to snack on it.

Who knew there was something to appreciate about tall, obnoxious weeds? The birds fly in low like a jet on approach, snag the weedy stalk with their landing gear, and hang on while it lurches back and forth like a ride at an amusement park. They make it look like fun to be a bird.

Across the street where the goats coexist with a herd of chickens and baby chicks in the neighbor’s back pasture, their hens tiptoe through irrigation lakes of their own, like they’re afraid to get their feet wet. Kind of like I do when I forget the front yard is a muddy bog every two weeks like it is today. Irrigation is the entire reason things are green in this little oasis in the desert, though, and I cannot tell you how happy that makes this weary desert dweller.

I’m so tired of the heat. It keeps me trapped in the house, playing snoop dog while I spy on the livestock outside who’ve learned how to survive in these temperatures. Sometimes I escape in my truck—and by ‘sometimes’ I mean three or four times a day—just for an air-conditioned change of scenery that won’t bring on heat exhaustion. I’m an A/C hopper. Hold my breath and jump inside the truck. Hold my breath on re-entry into the garage and run back inside the house.

Come to think of it, I do a pretty good imitation of a chicken, inside and out.

The birds have disappeared and I reach for the Dove bag again. “Chocolate now. Stress later,” the foil promises. I’d vote for skipping deferred stress, but there are still three or four more months of summer left for us so it must be true. “Smile like you found twenty dollars in your pocket,” another bite urges. Well, since the bag of chocolate is running low, twenty dollars would come in handy about now. “Manifest it and you’ll make it happen.” In case you lost count, that was the fifth Dove I stuffed into my mouth. I’m manifesting another couple of pounds on my frame as we speak. I probably ought to put this bag in the trash and slow down on the chocolate therapy. Is it too late to start a diet today?

Okay. One last piece. “If you don’t start today, you’ll regret it tomorrow,” my nemesis warns like a coach at a Weight Watcher meeting. In full on rebellion, I snag the final chocolate in the deflated bag of temptation. “Confidence starts with you,” it reads.

I’m not buying Dove chocolates anymore. They're too judgy.